PUBG Studios, a Krafton company, developed and launched the multiplayer battle royale video game PUBG: Battlegrounds, previously known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Based on earlier modifications made by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for several other games, the game was advanced into a standalone video game under the creative supervision of Greene. It was influenced by the Japanese 2000 movie Battle Royale.Ā
Up to 100 people can participate in the game, which takes place on an island where players scavenge for tools and weapons to murder other people while avoiding being killed themselves. Over time, the safe zone of the gameās map gets smaller, which forces survivors into tinier spaces where they must cause interactions. The round is won by the final player (or team) standing. The PUBG Universe series' first game is this one.
By the end of 2021, PUBG: Battlegrounds, the best-selling game on Personal Computer and Xbox One and the sixth best-selling video game, had sold nearly 75 million copies on gaming consoles and personal computers. The global release of PUBG Mobile has been even more popular, with over 1 billion installations and $8.42 billion in mobile gaming sales, ranking it as the fourth highest-earning app.Ā
As of May 2022, PUBG Battlegrounds has a cumulative revenue of $13.07 billion, ranking it one of the highest-earning video games. The total revenue of console and PC versions was $4.65 billion. The main game has been offered for free since January 2022.
The early access beta version of PUBG: Battlegrounds for Microsoft Windows was initially made available in March 2017, and the full release followed in December 2017. During the same month, Microsoft Studios made the game available for the Xbox One through its Xbox Game Preview programme.Ā
It was then made available to the public in September 2018. In addition to a PlayStation 4 port, PUBG Mobile Phone, a free-to-play mobile game, was published in 2018 for iOS and Android. The Stadia streaming platform's version debuted in April 2020, followed by the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S releases in November 2020.
Critics gave PUBG good reviews, noting that despite specific technical issues, the game featured new action that was highly replayable and easily accessible to gamers of all skill levels. The game was accredited with popularizing the battle royale subgenre; several unauthorized Chinese clones were also made due to its success.Ā
The game was nominated for various Game of the Year awards and other honours. To aid in broadcasting the video game to viewers and in the hopes that it would grow to be a well-known esport, PUBG Corporation has organised several modest tournaments.
In the player vs player shooting game PUBG, up to 100 players compete in a battle royale, a massive last-person standing deathmatch wherein gamers compete to survive as long as possible. Players can participate in the match alone, in a pair, or as a group of up to four players. The winner of the game is the last standing survivor or team.
Players land on one of the eight given maps by parachute at the beginning of each game. The maps have areas that are roughly 8 by 8 kilometres (5.0 by 5.0 miles), 6 by 6 kilometres (3.7 by 3.7 miles), 4 by 4 kilometres (2.5 by 2.5 miles), 3 by 3 kilometres (1.9 by 1.9 miles), and 1 by 1 kilometre (0.62 by 0.62 miles) in size.Ā
Players must rapidly decide when it would be best to evacuate and glide to the ground since the plane's course across the map changes with each round. Apart from their unique dress choices, players do not have any equipment at the beginning of the game. Players can find guns, cars, armour, and more things by finding out ghost towns, buildings, and various locations once they have landed.
At the beginning of a match, these things are procedurally dispersed over the map, with higher-quality gear often found in high-risk areas. Players who have been killed can also have their items plundered. Players can choose to play from either a third-person or first-person perspective, and each has its benefits and drawbacks in situational awareness and combat. But, server-specific settings can force all gamers into one view, eliminating some benefits.
Any player caught beyond the safe zone takes damage gradually and will eventually be terminated if the player does not enter the safe zone in time; in-game, the boundary is represented by a shimmering blue wall that gets smaller with time. The playable region of the map starts to diminish down to a random place every few minutes.
As a result, the map becomes more constrained, which raises the likelihood of encounters. Random areas of the map will occasionally be bombed and marked in red during a match, providing a hazard to players who stay there. Players are given notice of these occurrences in both circumstances a few minutes beforehand, allowing them time to find a safe place to hide.
Occasionally, at random, or when you fire a flare gun in the game, a plane will fly over different locations on the playable area and drop a loot box, carrying things ordinarily inaccessible during normal gameplay. These packages release bright red smoke, which captivates gamers' attention and results in further conflicts. Typically, a complete round lasts a little more than 30 minutes.
Players receive in-game cash based on their performance at the end of each round. The money is used to buy crates that contain accessories for customizing characters or weapons. In addition, in March 2018, a revolving "event mode" was incorporated into the game. These occurrences affect the standard gameplay parameters, such as the formation of bigger teams or squads or the distribution of armour and weaponry over the game map.
Brendan Greene, best known by his online alias PlayerUnknown, developed the ARMA 2 mod DayZ Battle Royale, a spinoff of the well-liked mod DayZ and influenced by the 2000 Japanese movie Battle Royale, and was in charge of the game's idea and design. Irish-born Greene, a web designer, photographer, and graphic designer residing in Brazil, composed DayZ: Battle Royale around 2013. He also enjoyed playing video games like Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America's Army.
He became interested in the DayZ mod because of its tactical military simulation and open-ended gameplay and began experimenting with a custom server while learning to program. Due to their compact and simple-to-remember battlefields, Greene regarded most competitive first-person shooters as overly repetitious. By making much larger maps that were difficult to memorise and employing arbitrary item placement across them, he achieved his goal of producing something with more randomness so that gamers would not know what to anticipate and increase the degree of replayability.
Greene was also motivated by the Survivor GameZ tournament for DayZ, which pitted several YouTube and Twitch streamers against one another until only a select few remained. Since Greene was not a streamer, he wanted to develop a mode for the game that everyone could play. His early work on this mod was more influenced by The Hunger Games books, where players would compete for weapons inventories at a centralized location.Ā
However, he moved away from this to give users an improved chance at survival by dispersing weapons and preventing copyright infringements with the books. Greene planned to utilize square safe zones since the Battle Royale movie inspired him, but due to his lack of coding skills, he used secure circular areas, which were carried over to Battlegrounds.
Despite the PlayStation 4 version receiving "mixed or mediocre reviews," Battlegrounds earned "generally good reviews" across all platforms, according to review aggregation website Metacritic. The game also broke multiple records for the player count during early access and later. Over ten million Battlegrounds rounds have been played within the game's initial four months of availability, roughly equivalent to more than 25,000 man-years of playtime.Ā
SteamSpy revealed that Battlegrounds has eclipsed enduringly popular games like Grand Theft Auto V and Fallout 4 in terms of concurrent player count and finally surpassed Dota 2, the platform's most played game for years, in August 2017. The game's top concurrent player count exceeded 1.3 million the next month, breaking the previous record of 1.29 set by Dota 2 in March 2016. In October 2017, the game attracted two million concurrent players and nearly three million by the year's conclusion.Ā
The game has also been successful in South Korean PC gaming communities; analytical company Gametrics revealed that by August 2017, Battlegrounds had exceeded Overwatch and overtaken League of Legends as the second-most played a video game in the nation. By October 2017, it has surpassed League of Legends. Due to the success of Battlegrounds in China, Steam users increased significantly; by the end of 2017, over half of the Steam customers had Chinese as their default language.
Numerous writers remarked on how quickly the player base grew for a video game that remained in early access. Greene was confident that the game could attract more than a million players in a single month, but several members of his development team had expected 200,000 to 300,000 players during the first year and were taken aback by how well it did in the first month. Greene himself thought that non-traditional promotional avenues like Twitch streams and other content producers, who have subsequently sought to offer new gameplay components before general release, were responsible for the significant growth.
One billion downloads of PUBG Mobile outside of China were recorded since its release, according to a March 2021 report. PUBG Mobile has generated $8.42 billion in revenue worldwide as of May 2022. At the same time, the Google Play store has 50 million downloads of Battlegrounds Mobile India.
