Sandbox shooter games have been some of the most popular breakout titles in the past few years and helped to spawn the insane growth of battle royale titles like Fortnite's bespoke mode and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. One of the largest games in that space, however, has practically fallen off of the map before it's even gotten out the gate. H1Z1 has seen its player base fall by more than 90 percent in the last eight months.
H1Z1 was a major successor to DayZ. Building off of the success of the open world looting formula, it offered zombie survival gameplay alongside a few feature improvements over the other zombie survival game. It also proved to be a great launching point for the mod that would one day before Battlegrounds.
Now though it seems to be dying and hard. Since July 2017 it's lost 91 percent of its players, falling from its then-peak of 150,000 to just 9,000 in February 2018.
As , H1Z1 used to be the third most popular game on Steam, only falling behind DotA 2 and Battlegrounds, sometimes beating out CSGO and Team Fortress 2, but no longer.
Blame for this player decline is mostly placed at the feet of new competition in the market, but fans of the game who still enjoy it claim that there has been far too little developer support, especially in light of newer games doing things better and releasing new content much more swiftly. Especially considering H1Z1 has been in Early Access for two years now.
All of this just weeks before the launch of the H1Z1 professional league, which promised salaries and gaming events that would rival some of the biggest eSports. That seems unlikely now that nobody is really playing anymore.
