Borderlands 3 has doubled Borderlands 2’s peak player count on PC

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On launch day, Borderlands 3’s peak concurrent PC player count doubled the all-time peak for Borderlands 2. That’s according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who tweeted the info Friday evening, almost exactly 24 hours after the game launched on PC.

“Fun Fact: On PC, the data is that the launch day peak concurrent players of Borderlands 3 is about *twice-as-high* as the all time peak concurrent players of Borderlands 2,” Pitchford wrote. “WOW! You guys are great!”

Borderlands 3 is a six-month timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store, and since at this point Epic does not share sales figures or aggregate player data, it isn’t possible to independently verify Pitchford’s numbers. But if he’s right, that means in its first day in the wild, Borderlands 3 hit a peak of nearly 250,000 concurrent players on PC alone. Borderlands 2 hit an all-time peak player count of 124,678 back when it launched on Steam.

That’s a hell of a lot of players by any measure, and if it sounds like an implausibly large number, there are two things to consider. First, Borderlands is a wildly popular franchise – at the time of this writing, there were more than 13,000 people active in Borderlands 2 on Steam. That game came out seven whole years ago.

Second, highly anticipated games seem to perform well on the Epic Games Store. The free-to-play behemoth hunting game Dauntless launched on the Epic Games Store alongside consoles in May, and has since more than quadrupled its early access player count, now boasting more than 10 million player accounts across all platforms.

Fun Fact: On PC, the data is that the launch day peak concurrent players of Borderlands 3 is about *twice-as-high* as the all time peak concurrent players of Borderlands 2. WOW! You guys are great!
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 13, 2019

That context in mind, the quarter million concurrent player number for Borderlands 3 – while still impressive – doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.

But while Borderlands 3’s sales may be doing gangbusters on PC, some players are a bit frustrated with its performance on the platform. Many have taken to Reddit to ask Gearbox for a patch to address performance issues they’ve encountered in their first hours with the game.