New Free AAA Shooter Flops, Even Highguard Beats It
Steam’s latest free AAA shooter is already trailing behind Highguard on the day of release.
PUBG: Blindspot launched into early access today on Steam, transforming the battle royale game into a 5v5 top-down shooter.
Planned to be in Early Access for “no longer than approximately 12 months”, developer ARC Team will be constantly refining and tweaking the game based on feedback from players.
“We believe the best version of PUBG: BLINDSPOT can only be created together with our players,” reads words from ARC Team on the game’s store page.
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“Early Access allows us to practice Open Development, where community feedback directly shapes the game’s systems, balance, and overall direction before full release.”
PUBG: Blindspot Has Not Got Off To A Great Start
At the time of writing this article, PUBG: Blindspot has 2,090 concurrent players according to SteamDB. Meanwhile, PUBG: Battlegrounds (formerly known as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) has around 341,769 concurrent players.
Obviously not a great start, but I’m sure the heads at Krafton probably weren’t expecting a huge explosion in players on the day of launch. Especially when PUBG: Blindspot appears to have a lower budget and is an early access game at the moment.
Still, you can’t help but compare it to another 5v5 shooter which was recently released, Highguard. This game originally launched with a 3v3 mode and saw lots of criticism as a result, but eventually added a 5v5 mode.
Highguard received an all-time peak of 97,249 players when it launched, but following the criticism, has leveled out at around 5,000 daily peak players. At the moment it has 2,092 concurrent players, two more than PUBG: Blindspot.
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So, it’s not a great start for PUBG: Blindspot. You could argue that player counts may rise at the weekend when people have more free time, but the first couple of days tend to be the strongest days for player numbers when it comes to multiplayer games, before they slowly trickle down.
Even recent successes like ARC Raiders, which averaged nearly 500,000 players in November 2025, now gets around half of those numbers each day.
It’s perfectly normal for multiplayer games to drop off their player counts after launch.
But still, with only 2,090 players on the first day, this doesn’t bode well for a game that will need a healthy population size to succeed.