Apparently the battle royale space ain’t big enough for H1Z1. The game’s playerbase has been decimated by the popularity of PUBG and Fortnite over the last few months. 

According to GitHyp, H1Z1 has been bleeding users ever since last August. In July of last year, the game’s concurrent player numbers on Steam peaked at roughly 150,000. Six months later, that number had dropped an incredible 78 percent, to just 33,000.

Things have only gotten worse in 2018. H1Z1’s concurrent player count is down 91 percent since its peak and is now  hovering in the 10,000-14,000 range. That’s an unbelievable fall from glory for a game that was once at the top of the emerging battle royale genre.

It really isn’t H1Z1‘s fault that their playerbase has disintegrated. Sure the dev team has fallen short in some aspects and Daybreak could have done more for the game overall, but PUBG and Fortnite are the ones truly at fault for H1Z1’s demise.

The battle royale genre is expansive, but it isn’t limitless. When you have games that explode in popularity like PUBG and Fortnite have, there has to be a take from somewhere. DayZ was the first to be sacrificed and it seems that H1Z1 is poised to be next.

According to H1Z1 game manager Anthony Castoro, PUBG owes all of it’s success to H1Z1.

In an interview with IGN, Castoro said that his company was the first to really identify the potential of the battle royale genre. He claims that PUBG was just a “fast follow opportunity.” Since H1Z1 did the hard work of “attracting that audience and really figuring out that formula,” PUBG was then able to come along and “take an existing game engine, find someone who has worked on this kind of idea that established it already, and do a decent job with the game.”

To Castoro’s credit, he’s right. H1Z1 certainly helped pave the way for the battle royale genre.

It’s kind of ironic. The battle royale genre has turned into a battle royale. And as is usually the case, the player who was best at the beginning likely won’t be the one who comes out on top in the end.