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The success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

Roar Rookie
18th September, 2017
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Team Immunity enjoyed an upset PUBG win. (Image: Bluehole Studio)
Roar Rookie
18th September, 2017
1

If you’ve somehow managed to escape the bubble of hype surrounding PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds or ‘PubG’ as it’s known in the community you’re a dying breed.

The game hit a huge milestone by breaking the record for the highest concurrent player count on Steam with 1.3 million users being reached.

What makes this such a spectacular feat is that the game isn’t even finished yet. PubG is still in Early Access with their Full Release said to be aiming for Q4 later this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if Christmas was the internal deadline Bluehole Studio Inc were working towards as the game would make a great gift based on it’s current wildfire popularity.

If you’re wondering what the game is about it is a match featuring 100 players who fly over an island in a cargo plane before parachuting down onto it. You choose where to direct your parachute to land and begin looting in buildings, as you start with no items or gear.

Every couple of minutes the playable area you can be in will start to shrink, if you are outside of the safe playable white zone you’ll be slowly killed by the blue zone. The goal is to be the last survivor which will net you a ‘Winner Winner Chicken Dinner’ screen.

Simple sounding enough, but each game can be a totally different experience every time.

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This game has gone on to show that it isn’t satisfied with following in a normal game’s lifecycle of development with the Gamescom Invitational that took place from August 23 – August 26 earlier this year.

That’s right, PubG managed to have an esports event with an early access game at a premier esports event such as Gamescom. This is a huge deal and the fact that the event was a huge success with a lot that Bluehole Studio could take away for their competition format for the future only propelled PubG further into a place which no other game has been before.

There are bugs and kinks in the game that the community and Bluehole Studio are aware of, you can often hear people joking about how the game is “esports ready” when something doesn’t go right on stream but this has not slowed sales of the game at all.

In fact as of September 6 the official PubG Twitter account confirmed that they had reached ten million copies sold

When you’ve got a community that is eager to make the game a success as much as the developers, true magic can happen. Those bugs that I was talking about? Some people do feel annoyed or confused, but most of the time you see people seeing the humour in the moment.

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After all you know the game is in early access so you’re willing to overlook this, or you’ve searched the hive of active PubG threads and saw the developers are aware of this bug and hoping to address it.

It’s a unique formula in PubG, because whatever happens in your battleground stays in that battleground, it’s very easy to exit once dead and get into a new game. It’s very refreshing and also another reason the game has high re-playability value.

What I’m interested to see however is how PubG continues to address its growing pains. Once the game has its full release will people still be as forgiving of any bugs they encounter while playing the game?

Also the ability to create custom game modes is currently only reserved for developers and PubG Partners, will this change in the future as the games player-base keeps multiplying?

There also have been reports of stream sniping becoming a huge issue for popular streamers of the game where they are constantly back to back being trolled or followed around by viewers looking to get a reaction out of them. Is there going to be an answer to how PubG can help alleviate this without streamers needing to turn to setting delays which impacts their responsiveness to chat?

If PubG is able to handle some of these nuances as they have been currently with quick solutions and an open gateway of communication – I’m confident the game will continue to succeed.

For now, this highly addictive game has played their cards well and is setting all kinds of records for the gaming industry with no signs of slowing down.

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It goes to show that if a game’s fundamental mechanics and design are present, combined with a creative approach using influencer marketing to ‘sell’ the game for you plus capitalising on hype around your product before it fades – the sky really is the limit here.

If you haven’t already – grab a ‘chute and I’ll see you on the battleground for that highly coveted Chicken Dinner!

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