PUBG Mobile celebrates 5 years — viewership numbers in esports and streaming

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PUBG Mobile, a battle royale game, is celebrating an anniversary this year — 5 years since its release. The game was released in March 2018, and in a few years, it has become one of the most popular mobile titles in the world. Over that time, hundreds of tournaments were held featuring teams playing for tens of millions of dollars of prize pools, and top competitions attracted millions of viewers. Esports Charts has compiled the top numbers to mark the game's anniversary.

PUBG Mobile in Esports

The release of PUBG Mobile took place shortly after the release of the original PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (now known as PUBG: Battlegrounds). According to Tencent Games, the development of the mobile title was carried out at a rapid rate and took only four months. In this case, both gamers and journalists highly appreciated the quality of the iOS and Android ports — the mobile version has retained not only the mechanics but also the charm of the original game.

PUBG Mobile enjoyed the greatest popularity in China, India, and the United States. Later this list was joined by South-East Asian countries, where mobile gaming has become very popular in recent years.

Not everywhere the game is distributed under its usual name due to different peculiarities of local laws. For example, in China, the game was released under the name Peacekeeper Elite, and in India, the game was relaunched as Battlegrounds Mobile India (however, even this port ended up being banned). In fact, Peacekeeper Elite and Battlegrounds Mobile India are practically clones of PUBG Mobile, but their data are not included in the overall brand statistics.

In the 5 years since the release of PUBG Mobile, there have been over 1,050 tournaments running for a total of over 26.7K hours. PUBG Mobile Global Championship Season 0, held between 2020 and 2021, was the most popular tournament, achieving a record Peak Viewers number in the discipline of over 3.8 million concurrent viewers. 

The most active year for PUBG Mobile was 2021, when the game's tournaments racked up a total of 216.8 million Hours Watched. There were several factors contributing to this: the game's popularity started to grow back during the pandemic and lockdowns, and it peaked in 2021 thanks to the return of LAN tournaments. The PMGC Season 0 broadcasts on NimoTV, which were integrated into the game client, also contributed greatly to the total Hours Watched in 2021. In fact, during that event, every user who logged into the game became a viewer of the tournament broadcast, making NimoTV able to set the record for PUBG Mobile's Peak Viewers number among all platforms at 2.8 million concurrent viewers. 

In 2022, the number of PUBG Mobile tournaments' Hours Watched decreased significantly, and there are several reasons for this. First, the format of the season has changed — the number of tournaments decreased, but the prize pools almost doubled to $4 million. Second, there was no more "NimoTV factor" — due to funding cuts, the platform stopped working in many countries, which had a direct effect on the number of viewers. Now YouTube is the main platform for tournament broadcasts. 

Indonesian viewers are the most active viewers of PUBG Mobile tournaments today, with broadcasts in Indonesian accounting for over 44% of the total Hours Watched of all tournaments played in five years. Malaysian and Hindi are in second place in the ranking of popular languages. 

PUBG Mobile in Streaming

Even five years after its release, PUBG Mobile continues to rank high in the top categories on streaming platforms. For example, it ranked first among all categories on FB at the end of 2022 with almost 420 million Hours Watched. KRAFTON's Battle Royale was well ahead of such popular mobile titles as Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Garena Free Fire.  

PUBG Mobile is also in the Top 10 most popular categories on YouTube Gaming and Trovo, as well as on NimoTV, although the latter stopped working back in April in many large countries like Brazil and Indonesia. As for Twitch, PUBG Mobile is severely inferior to the other categories, but this is due to the high competition and the fact that Twitch is not the main platform for the discipline. In Southeast Asia, where the main audience of the title is located, it is YouTube and FB that are more popular.

PUBG Mobile ranks on different platforms in 2022

PUBG Mobile Global Championship 2022 was the last major PUBG Mobile tournament, the final of which was held in Jakarta in early January 2023. The event saw more than 27.3 million Hours Watched and 851.7K Peak Viewers.