What is PUBG? Why is it so popular? Is it worth playing?
Artstation Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/akash_sathyamurthy
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) is a multiplayer online battle royale game developed by a PUBG Corporation, a subsidiary of Korean publisher Bluehole.
We cannot say that PUBG is one of a kind because there have been a lot of games based on this battle royale style. The designer of PUBG, Brendan Greene says that he got his inspiration from the film Japanese film “Battle Royale”. Some of the similarities to this game is the movie “The Hunger Games,” and other games such as “H1Z1: King of the Kill,” “DayZ” and etc.
However, since there are a lot of games, movies and stories out there, most of the things are saturated. Now, at this time what matters is that, how they are presented to the audience and whether they are able to connect with the them. This determines the success rate in this era of games. Some are exceptional.
PUBG is a non-Valve game on Steam to have the most number of players. It is not at all a normal phenomenon to overtake CS:GO(Counter Strike:Global Offensive) and Dota 2 which are top rated games on Steam by an Indie Studio. But PUBG had made it possible. It had taught us again that, “Nothing is impossible” and had more than 5 million copies sold at the time of writing this. It made a huge success while it was still in it’s early access.
GAMEPLAY:
There will be 100 players along with you. You will get on the plane and you have to be dropped in an island. And below is the map in which you will play. My mind slowly drifts towards Hunger Games which works on the same mechanics.
After parachuting down from the plane, you have to loot things because you will have nothing in your hand. There may be problem if there are people on the corner of the map and they don’t meet. To avoid this situation, after a few minutes a circle will emerge and you have to be inside the circle and it will start decreasing based on time. If you are outside the circle, then you will loose your health. So in this your main objective is to loot and to be the last man standing. You can play solo, duo and squad. Their optimisation is not so great. Hope they will rectify that in the future.
TIP: You can come within top 10 without encountering the enemies if you have enough stealth skills.
WEAPON:
Their weapon style was amazing. You have to loot parts of the weapon to have the most accuracy. For eg. You have to loot the suppressor, red dot sight, scopes etc. They don’t come with the gun. This made the game so interesting. This will be good unless they do micro transactions. Does some one sneak in? Not EA, definitely not you. Grenades are also available.
MARKETING:
They didn’t do any traditional marketing. They didn’t have big Titans in the shopping-malls like Titanfall 2 did. Their main strategy was Double dip digital marketing. It means they give the game to lots of streamers for playing on their Twitch and Youtube channel. Since, streamers loved that game a lot, it spread among them and then made the other gamers and viewers buy that. This was the best move that made PUBG this successful.
HACKERS:
There were lots of hackers in PUBG. This made the game quite like CS:GO (Psssh! CS:GO is infested with hackers). There were speed hacks, aim bot and a lot more.
On the other hand there was another problem and it was Stream Sniping. It means other players watch the streamer streaming and knowing his location they kill him. Soon, it started loosing its entertaining value among streamers and other people. They complained to Bluehole about this. Since, it was most popular among streamers, Bluehole decided to do something about that. So, in order to eradicate the hackers they decided to use anti-cheat system called BattlEye, which automatically bans someone who attempts to use cheats like aimbots or other hacks, before they’re even able to use them in-game. The bans are permanent.
It bans like 6000 players per day and so far they have banned more than 150,000 cheaters. But there was a huge problem again. Even the people who didn’t cheat got banned because of shooting a streamer and they were banned under stream sniping. Overnight its negative reviews reached its peak. That’s why I would never shoot a streamer. OMG! Wait. How do I know in the middle of the battle if he is a streamer or not?
This made PUBG get a lot of negative reviews. So it stepped down from Overwhelmingly positive to Mostly Negative. But it’s sales didn’t stop. People where buying then too. I was really shocked. It became the game with many negative reviews on steam to be the most played game on steam. After that it’s reviews became Mixed.
PROBLEM WHEN POPULAR:
Their sales grew from 100 to 100,000 in sales. Then half a million and it kept on increasing. Then they reached 990,000. And after that they reached a million players on steam. Suddenly, when it reached more than a million players their servers got crashed. Their servers could handle only a million players. Poor fellows. Who taught this game might be this popular? Not even the designer of the game thought of it. They tried to save cash by having their servers handle only a million users so that they can buy candy. But now, Holy Shit! This made the users give some more negative reviews.
But they somehow managed to repair the servers and now it can handle more players and they are managing this. So don’t worry. The servers will not crash when you play. You can buy if you are planning to do so.
At this time on 2nd December, 2017 the peak in Steam was 2,961,867 players. Soon to reach 3 million peak.
STEAM MARKET VALUE:
With the introduction of a ‘Crate and Key’ system seen in games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has now joined the growing set of games offering cosmetics at a premium during Early Access.
Its rare items are so costly. It’s most expensive is the Ivory School Uniform Set (Female). It’s cost at the time of writing is $1023. Holy shit!
Second costliest is Bandana. Its cost at the time of writing is $1007.
Dude! Why are you paying so much? You could get a real one consists of 10 pcs for $17 in Amazon.
The next one is Black School Uniform Set (Female) which goes for $834.
These are the top 3 at the time of writing. I am getting rich by playing this game. Come on!
Now Microsoft invested in PUBG and they have some shares in Bluehole and they are planning to release it on Xbox One X. It will run 60 fps on Xbox One X. In steam, they are running test servers on Vault system and some more updates. Now a days they are conducting competitive tournaments in PUBG, where famous companies like Intel is sponsoring.
This is how the Unknown Game became the most popular game in the short period of time even when it is in its early access stage.
Thanks for reading.
Artstation Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/akash_sathyamurthy
