Battlegrounds made US$11 million in the first three days of its Windows early access release in March 2017. By the second week of April, the game had sold over one million copies, with a peak player count of 89,000, SuperData Research estimated that the game’s April sales exceeded US$34 million, putting it as one of the top 10 highest grossing revenue games for the month and exceeding revenue from Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. By May 2017, the game had sold over two million copies, with total gross revenues estimated at US$60 million. Within three months of its early access release, it had surpassed over five million copies sold, and Bluehole announced it had exceeded US$100 million in sale revenue. Battlegrounds reached this four million mark faster than Minecraft, which took over a year to reach similar sales figures while it was in its paid-beta development period.
By September 2017, Bluehole’s value, as tracked by a firm that tracks private Korean corporations, increased five-fold from June of that year to a value of US$4.6 billion, primarily due to Battlegrounds. By December 2017, PUBG Corporation reported that there were more than 30 million players worldwide between the Windows and Xbox versions. The research film SuperData estimated that Battlegrounds drew in more than US$712 million in revenue within 2017. By February 2018, the game had sold over thirty million on Steam according to Steam Spy. The following month, Steam’s President Gabe Newell stated that the game was the third highest-grossing game of all time on the platform. PUBG: Battlegrounds is the best-selling video game on PC and Xbox One as of before the release of the PlayStation 4 version, 42 million copies sold on PC and 9 million copies sold on Xbox One.[164][165]