PlayerUnknown’s Battleground or PUBG is a game that currently holds the attention of an entire generation. So much so, that as of today, its stripped down mobile version, PUBG Mobile has crossed 100 million downloads on Android and iOS. For those of you who are pretty clueless about this mega popular game, PUBG is an multiplayer online battle royale game. 100 players are dropped on a map, that has a circle on it symbolling the ‘safe zone’. This circle is constantly shrinking, so players have to make sure to be inside it while also collecting armor and health kits, and killing as many players as possible till they are the last ones standing. This game can be played with up to four friends, where you make a squad and proceed together. If you’re still unclear about it, remember how the arena in Hunger Games worked? It’s something similar, without the controlling overheads… and the actual death of participants. Upon your survival you win the Chicken Dinner, and up your ranking. But even if you’re somebody who’s collecting those daily login rewards, and land directly in Pochinki to attack, we bet you don’t know PUBG actually came to be. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you all about it
How was PUBG invented?
A few years ago, a military stimulation PC game, called ARMA 2, was all the rage. ARMA 2 gave extensive support for building your own modifications (mods) into it, building content and creating a new game within in. One such popular mod on the game was called DayZ, which used hyper realistic combat mechanics to stimulate a zombie apocalypse.
This piqued the curiosity of a player called Brendon Greene, who wanted an open ended game play. So Greene decided to create his own mod, and named it Arma 2: Battle Royale, based on the eponymous Japanese film. Soon enough, Greene’s mod became a favourite among players.
Now, there are two things to know about Greene; one, he wasn’t a video game developer but rather an Irish photographer. Two, in the world of online video games, Greene’s username was PlayerUnknown. The reason why he created his own mod was because he found that the maps were too small and easy to memorize on the mods, and things got way too repetitive. He, on the other hand, wanted the map to be so large that players could launch sneak attacks on other players.
In time, DayZ separated from ARMA 2 to become its standalone Zombie Apocalypse game. And Greene began developing his mod for ARMA 3. But before he could do that, Sony Online Entertainment, which is now known as Daybreak Game Company, brought him onboard to consult on DayZ, which was now called H1Z1.
Around the same time, Ginno Games, a Seoul-based company led by Chang-Han Kim, was acquired by Bluehole and was named Bluehole Ginno Games in 2015. Kim was looking for a kickass Battle Royale game that would gain popularity in South Korea. During his time of research, he came across Brendon Greene and reached out to him.
Fortunately, by this time, Greene had quit Sony Entertainment and soon, flew to Korea to discuss plans with Bluehole’s team. A few weeks later, he became the Creative Director of Bluehole. Together, Greene and Kim began creating the game they wanted in 2016, and moreover, they wanted it to be ready to play within in a year. In fact, they wanted the game to be in the customers hand on early access basis. However, they would keep improving it over time, and to facilitate that they built a solid foundation. With the rapid growth of the game, Bluehole Ginno Games’ name was changed to PUBG Corporation.
They started off with one map, Erangel, and one mode, the classic one. They added more weapons after the first version of the game went live in March 2017 on Steam. The players increased every week, and in the first four weeks after the game was released, 10 million rounds of the game had already been played. In the first three days, PUBG had already made $11 million. And in the month after its release, PUBG had already sold a million copies.
By October, PUBG had crossed two million concurrent players, beating out DOTA 2’s record. By the time two million copies of the game had been sold, Bluehole held a charity tournament for the first time. And three months later, a major PUBG tournament was held by Electronic Sports League (ESL), making a place for PUBG’s future as a eSport. By July, Bluehole had partnered with Facebook for live streams to get more gaming content. And by December, Tencent Games, the biggest publisher of games in China had approached them to publish the game in China. In December 2017, PUBG was made available on Xbox, with early access.
Initially, PUBG faced some flak from the government for being too violent, but it was was later resolved when they entered in an agreement with the government. Once that happened, PUBG Corp and Tencent developed two different versions to be released on mobiles. The first was called, PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield, which was a shorter version of the original game. This version was developed by Tencent’s internal division — Lightspeed and Quantam studio. The second version was dubbed PUBG: Army Attack, which consisted of more arcade style games developed by Tencent’s Timi games. By February 2018, both these free games were released on Android and iOS in China. And by March, the PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield was released worldwide as PUBG Mobile.
And now, merely five months and about seven updates later, PUBG has crossed 100 million downloads. It has become the defining game of the Battle Royale genre, and a prominent part of pop culture.
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