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PUBG, aka Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, redefined the gaming industry by creating an entirely new genre of game called Battle Royale. And yes, it was based on the Japanese film from the year 2000 if you were wondering where the creator, Brendan Greene, got his inspiration from. But it’s more than that because this story isn’t just about an epic rise of a game we may or may not have all played and enjoyed. This is also about what went wrong and why PUBG is no longer on the top of the charts and gracing our hearts. So open your ears and drop that sandwich — actually let me get that sandwich (I’m hungry) — and let’s talk about how PUBG rose and fell from the top of the charts in the short span of only three years.
The Start
The beginning of PUBG is a true inspiration to anyone out there who is trying to make their dream a reality. The game began as a mod, or modification for all you old folks out there who don’t know what a mod is. And this mod was created for a military simulation game by the name of Arma 2, which to be honest is a clunky game that is hard to play and confusing to understand. But nonetheless, Arma 2 was popular within the PC gaming community and Brendan Green was at the forefront of innovation within the game with his own mod that he released on April 8, 2015 by the name of “PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battle Royale.” So Green released this mod and it immediately gained popularity as it is now one of the top-five mods ever made for Arma 2 and it was even grandfathered into Arma 3 once that was released. This popularity eventually led to the game we now know as PUBG.
The Launch
Brendan Greene continue working on his mod, making tweaks and listening to community feedback until he got a phone call from a company by the name of Bluehole, Inc who was (at the time) best known for creating a game called TERA. From that moment, many community members (including myself) now had the option to purchase early-access to what was the beta version of PUBG. We basically bought a game with a massive amount of bugs in hope that our feedback could help PUBG become the game we thought it could be. But here is where the issues starting to rise as the company and Brendan Greene clearly cared more about making money than actually fixing their broken game as they would take months to fix glaring bugs but would be quick to launch in-game paid options like skins.
But nonetheless, we continued to play as I personally logged something like 5,000 hours of gameplay as I tried to go pro. This turned out to be a bit of a waste of time which I’ll get to later. But at the end of the day, PUBG launched at the end of 2017 and everyone loved it as the game set multiple records for concurrent users on Steam in a single day with the peak being around 3.2 million users at the beginning of 2018. PUBG came out guns blazing but this is where the issues began to take form as it seemed the company starting running before it learned to walk.
The Issues
Right after launch, the game saw a massive influx of new users which is usually a good thing when the company behind it is prepared. But when the company behind it is not prepared, this massive increase in users can be a strain on back-end servers and a strain on the staff working on the game. Remember that games are not just a create-it, launch-it-and-sit-back type of deal. These companies such as Bluehole are forced to deal with millions of support tickets, they are forced to pay massive amounts of money for server space for their newfound user base and finally they are forced to deal with bugs in a much timelier manner. But as I mentioned earlier, they were utterly useless when it came to things like dealing with bugs or creating new maps or adding new features. And even when they did do these things they were less than satisfactory to the community as it was more of a feeling of “finally they did it” than excitement from users.
Remember how I mentioned they tried to run before they could walk? Well, while all of these bugs were looming and claims of massive amounts of hackers playing in the game (so many hackers), Bluehole continued to push their newly founded professional scene which was initially very popular. Organizations like Cloud9, Ghost and even Faze hopped into the PUBG pro scene and immediately started to dominate. But the thing about pro players is they will not continue to play your game if you do not fix the bugs. And the thing about organizations is that if owning a team doesn’t make fiscal sense, then they will disband their teams before they take a loss. This is why we only saw the pro scene last for a few months at most as the game had too many bugs, the pro matches were not enjoyable to watch and the organizations were not making enough money. The pro scene came and vanished quicker than I eat a Snickers and that’s not even a joke — I can smash those things. But this isn’t even the worst part of what happened to PUBG.
The Fall
The final straw that forced the hand of many users to quit playing PUBG was the fact that even when they won Game of the Year in 2018 and set multiple Steam records for user count, they continued to create more and more in-game transactions, personalized streamer gear and such, which utterly pissed off the user base. And then they made the ultimate sin: they created a mobile version of their game which basically was a money-grab like most PC games end up being nowadays. So sure, you check the stats on total revenue, you see they made over $1 billion in a short span of only three years and you think “wow, they are killing it.” But when you take a look at the active user base on Steam at this very moment, you can see that they had a mere 562,000 active users in the entire month of March. Sure, that is respectable, but it’s not even close to the 25 million active users they had in the month of January 2018 and this is because of a few major points which I touched on in this article.
First off, they were not prepared for the immediate increase in users which shows that you can actually be too successful for your own good. Next up, the company behind the game was not quick enough to fix the glaring bugs which lasted months and frustrated the user base so much that Bluehole thought it would be good idea to create a campaign called #FixPUBG which pissed us off even more. Then we had the creation of the mobile game and the creation of the console games which further ruined the feel of the game as PC is the only way you can truly feel good playing a game like PUBG. And finally, the company ran before they learned to walk as they had mentioned potentially franchising a professional league to rival that of Overwatch. I mean, there aren’t even professional teams playing PUBG on the PC anymore, which is basically just one big GG for PUBG.
