Battlegrounds made US$11 million in the first three days of its Windows early access release in March 2017. By the second week of April, the game had sold over one million copies, with a peak player count of 89,000, SuperData Research estimated that the game’s April sales exceeded US$34 million, putting it as one of the top 10 highest … Read more
Battlegrounds received “generally favorable reviews” on all platforms, with the exception of the PlayStation 4 version which received “mixed or average reviews”, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. During both its early access phase and after, the game also surpassed numerous player-count records. Bluehole released statistics for the first four months of release that showed that … Read more
Krafton had looked to expand PUBG beyond the core game as to expand the narrative universe. As part of this, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was quietly rebranded as PUBG Battlegroundsaround July 2021. Starting in 2020, Krafton released a series of live-action documentaries starring Jonathan Frakes that explored the origins of the game’s Battlegrounds. Ahead of the game’s … Read more
To celebrate the game surpassing two million copies sold, Bluehole announced a 2017 Charity Invitational event, inviting 128 players to compete over their official Twitch channel to raise money for the Gamers Outreach Foundation, with Bluehole matching all donations up to US$100,000. The competition ran in early May 2017, and raised at least US$120,000 from … Read more
Greene was part of Microsoft’s press conference during E3 2017 to announce that PUBG would be coming to Xbox One as a timed console exclusive sometime by the end of 2017, using the Xbox Game Preview early access approach to test it. Initially, Greene said that Microsoft was not directly involved in the porting but … Read more
Bluehole used closed alpha and beta periods with about 80,000 players to gauge initial reaction to the gameplay and adjust balance prior to a wider release. Just prior to the early access phase on Steam, Bluehole opened a few servers and invited some popular live streamers of similar games to try it out as to start … Read more
The game also features custom gamemodes and modding support. He considered modding support an essential part of the full release as, just as he had his start with mods, he wants to enable others to create variations on his game so that he could “find the next PlayerUnknown”. This was aided by a quiet release of … Read more
Greene also introduced microtransactions that allow players to use real-world funds to purchase loot crates that provide randomly-selected cosmetic items, also known as “skins”, which they can trade with other players; while Greene recognizes the issue with skin gambling, he believes that Valve has put safeguards in place to support a “skin economy” that will … Read more
PUBG represents the standalone version of what Greene believes is the “final version” of the battle royale concept, incorporating the elements he had designed in previous iterations. Faster development was possible with the game engine Unreal Engine 4, compared with ARMA and H1Z1, which were built with proprietary game engines. Greene acknowledged that implementing the size … Read more
The game’s concept and design was led by Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, who had previously created the ARMA 2 modDayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.[10][11] At the time he created DayZ: Battle Royale, around 2013, Irish-born Greene had … Read more