PUBG: Battlegrounds

• 1. Introduction

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  PUBG: Battlegrounds, a battle royale video game from 2017, once had 2,279,084 people playing it on Steam at the same moment. It reached that peak while still officially unfinished, listed as an early access title. The game began as a hobbyist's modification of other people's games. It grew into one of the best-selling titles ever made. Its path ran from a photographer's home in Brazil to a studio in Seoul, and through cheating scandals, lawsuits and government bans. How did a modder's side project become a worldwide business? Why did a Korean studio hand its creative direction to a foreigner? And why did several countries try to shut the game down?

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• 2. A Modder From Brazil

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  Around 2013, Brendan Greene was an Irish-born photographer who had lived in Brazil for a few years. He also worked as a graphic designer and web designer. He played military games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America's Army. Then the DayZ mod for ARMA 2 caught his attention, because it was a realistic military simulation with open-ended play. He set up a custom server and taught himself programming as he went.

  Greene online went by the handle PlayerUnknown. He found most multiplayer shooters repetitive, since their small maps were easy to memorize. He wanted surprise instead. Vastly larger maps and randomly placed items would keep players guessing and make every match different.

  An online DayZ contest called Survivor GameZ gave him another push. It pitted Twitch and YouTube streamers against each other until only a few were left. Greene was not a streamer, so he set out to build a similar mode that anyone could join.

  The Hunger Games novels shaped his first attempts, with players racing toward weapons stockpiled in one central spot. He drifted away from that idea, partly to give players a better chance of surviving by scattering weapons, and partly to avoid copyright problems with the books. The 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale inspired him too. He pictured square safe areas, but his limited coding skill produced circular ones, and the circle stayed in the finished game.

  When DayZ became a standalone title, interest in his ARMA 2 mod faded, and Greene moved on to ARMA 3. Sony Online Entertainment, now the Daybreak Game Company, took notice. It hired him as a consultant on H1Z1 and licensed his battle royale idea. In February 2016, Sony Online split H1Z1 into the survival mode H1Z1: Just Survive and the battle royale-like H1Z1: King of the Kill. His consultation period ended around the same time, and a studio in Seoul was already searching for someone with his idea.

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• 3. Seoul Takes a Chance

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  Chang-han Kim led Ginno Games, a Seoul studio that built massively multiplayer online games for personal computers. In January 2015, Bluehole, a major South Korean publisher of online and mobile games, acquired the studio and renamed it Bluehole Ginno Games. Kim knew that a hit in South Korea usually got published around the world. Playing DayZ had made him eager to try a battle royale game, a format that had not caught on in Korea. He wanted an early access release, a very short schedule and a games as a service model that could be supported for years.

  Kim's research led him to Greene's mods, and he reached out. Within a week, Greene flew to Bluehole's headquarters in Korea. A few weeks later he was the company's creative director and living in South Korea. By Greene's account, no Korean game studio had ever given a foreigner that role. He said his relationship with management was strong, so his team could work with little oversight.

  Development began in early 2016 and was announced that June, with a plan to finish within a year. Kim served as executive producer. About 35 developers supported Greene at the start, and the team had grown to 70 by June 2017. Greene said many of them put in extra hours voluntarily. Bohemia Interactive, the maker of ARMA and DayZ, helped with motion capture animations through its Prague studio. Tom Salta composed the main musical theme, which Greene chose in hopes of an orchestral electronic hybrid with a huge build-up.

  In September 2017, Bluehole moved the entire project into Bluehole Ginno Games, which was renamed PUBG Corporation with Kim as chief executive officer. Bluehole created Krafton in 2018 as a holding company for its game studios and took over publishing duties. By December 2020, Krafton had folded PUBG Corporation into its internal studio system as PUBG Studios.

  In March 2019, Greene announced he was stepping down as lead designer while staying on as a creative consultant. Art director Tae-seok Jang replaced him. Greene moved to the Amsterdam studio PUBG Special Projects, which also put him closer to his family in Ireland. He said he wanted to try a multiplayer project that was not tied to battle royale.

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• 4. Inside the Game

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  A plane crosses an island carrying up to one hundred players, and each must decide when to jump. The game offers eight maps, with sizes ranging from 1 to 64 square kilometers. The plane's route changes every round. Players land with nothing but cosmetic clothing, then search buildings, ghost towns and other sites for weapons, vehicles and armor. Items are distributed procedurally at the start of a match, and high-risk zones usually hold better equipment. Defeated players can be looted too.

  Players can enter solo, as a duo, or in a team of up to four, and the last person or team alive wins. Every few minutes, the playable area shrinks toward a random location. Anyone caught outside takes steady damage and is eventually eliminated. Players see the boundary as a shimmering blue wall. Random regions are also marked in red and bombed, and warnings arrive a few minutes ahead. A plane occasionally drops a loot package wherever a flare gun is fired, or at random. Red smoke draws players toward it. A full round takes no more than 30 minutes.

  Erangel, the first map, was an island with many terrain features, and Greene drew on his experience with the genre to pick it. Some buildings imitated the brutalist architecture of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Developers playtested item placement to reward strategy without punishing players who found no weapon in the first few minutes. Greene still thought the map felt disjointed, even though it met their gameplay goals.

  Unreal Engine 4 let the team work faster than the proprietary engines behind ARMA and H1Z1. Huge maps were a struggle, since the engine was not designed for them. Greene aimed for a blend of ARMA 3's realism and H1Z1's arcade action. He saw three subgames inside each match: the airdrop, the hunt for loot, and the fight with other players.

  Winners see the phrase "winner winner chicken dinner", an idiom Greene used in his earlier battle royale games. It has origins as far back as the Great Depression era.

  Crates of cosmetic items, called skins, can be bought with real money and traded between players. By November 2017, gray market sites had begun using PUBG skins as gambling currency. The studio promised it would never sell anything that changes gameplay. In May 2018, it disabled skin trading on the Steam Marketplace, after players kept selling skins for money through outside platforms.

  Greene also wanted custom game modes and modding support, so he could "find the next PlayerUnknown". Influential streamers received custom servers early. One result was Zombie Mode, where all but four players pretend to be zombies who may strip off their clothes and fight only with melee weapons. Greene announced an official zombie mode inspired by it, and planned to build it almost alone, with help from the lead animator.

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• 5. Early Access Surge

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  Before the 23rd of March 2017, Bluehole ran closed alpha and beta periods with about 80,000 players. It also let popular streamers of similar games try a few servers. Then early access for Windows opened on Steam. The plan was a stay of roughly six months, aiming for a full release in September. Greene expected over a million players within a month, while some of his team predicted only 200,000 to 300,000 in the first year.

  The response outran both guesses. Bluehole had meant to build the audience slowly and market the game only once it was finished. Instead the sudden demand made network stability a priority alongside gameplay. In July 2017, Greene announced the early access period would be extended by a few months. He explained that holding to the original schedule "could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met". Weekly patches had caused quality control problems, so from August the studio slowed their pace. The full release still arrived on the 20th of December 2017.

  The numbers kept breaking records. The game sold one million copies in just 16 days and grossed 100 million dollars in 79 days. Within three months it had passed five million copies. In August 2017 it overtook Dota 2, the most played game on Steam for years. The next month its peak passed 1.3 million concurrent players, above the 1.29 million Dota 2 set in March 2016. In total, it collected seven Guinness World Records on Steam. One was for the first non-Valve game to be the most played on the platform, since Steam's launch in 2003.

  South Korea followed. By October 2017, the game had passed League of Legends in the country's PC bangs. In China, its popularity pushed more than half of Steam clients to a Chinese default language by late 2017.

  Streaming helped. Bluehole held a charity invitational in early May 2017, with 128 players, to mark two million copies sold. It raised money for the Gamers Outreach Foundation. In August 2017, at Gamescom, Bluehole and ESL staged the first PUBG invitational, with a 350,000 dollar prize pool. Events covered solo players, duos, first-person duos and four-player squads. Greene said the path to esports would take "baby steps".

  By December 2017, the Windows and Xbox versions together had more than 30 million players. In the end, the PC and console game sold over 75 million copies. That made it the second-best-selling game on PC, the best-selling game on Xbox One and the fifth best-selling video game of all time.

  At The Game Awards 2017, the still-unfinished game won Best Multiplayer Game. It was also nominated for Game of the Year, the first early access title named for that honor. The nomination stirred debate.

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• 6. Many Screens

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  At E3 2017, Greene joined Microsoft's press conference to announce an Xbox One version, a timed console exclusive. Anticto, a Spanish developer, handled much of the porting at first. Microsoft Studios then confirmed it would publish the game. Nico Bihary, who led the project for Microsoft, described a "white glove" treatment. The Coalition lent its time, and Rare shared the water rendering it had built for Sea of Thieves. Kim also hoped for cross-platform play between Windows and console, but worried about keyboard and mouse players beating controller players.

  The Xbox early access edition launched on the 12th of December 2017, in digital and physical formats. A week earlier, Microsoft dropped real supply crates in Australia holding Xbox hardware and merchandise, with passcodes posted on social media. Within three days, Microsoft announced more than a million copies sold on Xbox. The full Xbox release followed on the 4th of September 2018.

  Sony's console took longer. Kim said the team had launched first on Steam and Xbox Game Preview because both allowed unfinished games to be updated over time. Sony had no early access program and applied strict quality control. The PlayStation 4 version arrived on the 7th of December 2018. It offered exclusive cosmetics, including Nathan Drake's outfit from Uncharted and Ellie's backpack from The Last of Us. Jordan Vogt-Roberts directed a short live-action film for it, starring Jason Mitchell. Stadia received the Pioneer Edition on the 28th of April 2020. Support for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was scheduled to end on the 13th of November 2025, with native versions arriving for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.

  Meanwhile, Tencent Games prepared two mobile versions for China. Both launched for Android and iOS on the 9th of February 2018. They had a combined 75 million pre-registrations and took the top two spots on China's iOS download charts. An English version of one, called PUBG Mobile, reached the world on the 19th of March 2018. Its player base grew quickly in Asia, because it ran on lower-powered phones. It had over 100 million downloads by August 2018 and more than 225 million two months later, ahead of Fortnite's combined players at nearly the same point. By 2019 downloads reached 555 million, and by March 2021 one billion outside China.

  China's own release took a different road. A government approval freeze stalled the Chinese mobile game through most of 2018. By May 2019, Tencent had dropped the plan and re-released the game as Game for Peace, without blood and gore. It was renamed Peacekeeper Elite in 2020.

  On the 12th of January 2022, the PC and console game became free to play. A new tier called Battleground Plus added customization items and ranked mode. Krafton's first-quarter report for 2022 credited the change for higher profits, with PC sales up 61 percent and console revenue up 274 percent. Through the third quarter of 2022, mobile earned 9 billion dollars and PC and console 4 billion dollars, for a total of 13 billion dollars.

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• 7. Cheats and Bans

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  By October 2018, the anti-cheating software BattlEye had permanently banned over 13 million players. BattlEye reported that 99 percent of the cheating software for the game came from China. The scale of the problem was tied to the game's popularity there. Tencent, the largest video game publisher in China, approached Bluehole in 2017 about publishing the game in that country.

  China's approval was far from certain. In October 2017, the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association discouraged battle royale games, calling them too violent and at odds with socialist values. The next month, the game reached a formal agreement with the Chinese government, with Tencent as publishing partner. That version was censored, with lessened graphic violence. In South Korea, Kakao Games markets and distributes the game.

  Before any deal, Chinese players had found ways to reach the game on Steam through proxies and other networking tricks. PUBG Corporation planned ping limits for servers to ease latency problems and cheating. Tencent identified around 30 cheating programs and reported them to Chinese police, leading to over a hundred arrests by the start of 2018.

  Some Western players blamed Chinese players for cheating through network latency tricks. A small number demanded region-separated servers and hurled racial insults at Chinese players. Greene was disappointed by this "xenophobic attitude", calling it "disgraceful", and he asked players to respect Chinese players, whose numbers were key to the game's success. He also noted that virtual private networks could defeat region locks. Region-based matchmaking arrived by October 2018, though players still reported connectivity problems and slow matches.

  August 2018 brought the "Fix PUBG" campaign, in which PUBG Corporation admitted lingering bugs and performance trouble. It ended in November, with everything on the list implemented.

  Governments had their own objections. In March 2019, the Indian state of Gujarat banned the game as too addictive and a distraction during exam season, and students caught playing were arrested. Nepal and Iraq followed in April 2019, citing harm to children and teenagers. Nepal's Supreme Court soon lifted its ban, ruling that the government had not shown why interfering with personal freedoms was necessary. Jordan and the Indonesian province of Aceh issued similar bans in mid-2019.

  On the 1st of July 2020, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority banned the game, calling it addictive and harmful to children's health. The ban stayed in place for about a month. After a meeting on the 30th of July 2020 with representatives of Proxima Beta, the authority lifted it.

  The heaviest blow came on the 2nd of September 2020, amid China-India border skirmishes. India banned PUBG Mobile along with more than 100 other Chinese apps, claiming they transmitted user data to servers outside the country. India was PUBG Mobile's largest market, with 175 million downloads and 24 percent of global users. On the 6th of May 2021, Krafton announced a relaunch there as Battlegrounds Mobile India, published directly by Krafton instead of Tencent.

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• 8. Copycats and Courtrooms

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  Epic Games released Fortnite Battle Royale as a standalone free-to-play game in September 2017. Fortnite had begun as a survival title with fortress building, and Epic added a battle royale mode that kept the building. Bluehole voiced concern soon afterward. It admitted it could not claim ownership of the genre. But it had worked with Epic on Unreal Engine support, and feared Epic might have had advance notice of planned features. In January 2018, PUBG Corporation sued Epic Games Korea, alleging that Fortnite Battle Royale infringed Battlegrounds' copyright. The company closed the suit in June 2018 for undisclosed reasons.

  In China, clones multiplied so fast that they were treated as a new genre called "chicken-eating game", a nod to the winner's line. Greene said: "I want this genre of games to grow. For that to happen you need new and interesting spins on the game mode. If it's just copycats down the line, then the genre doesn't grow and people get bored." He claimed no ownership of battle royale itself. But he believed clones copied specific mechanics from his games and mods, such as the opening parachute drop and the red-zone bombing. He said he would like legislation protecting developers from such imitation.

  PUBG Corporation also went after NetEase, a Chinese publisher. In January 2018, it filed in the Northern District Court of California, claiming that the mobile games Rules of Survival and Knives Out infringed its copyrights. Some shared features were common to battle royale games. But PUBG pointed to details such as chickens for winners and cookware used as weapons or armor. It sought damages and an injunction. NetEase denied the claims. By March 2019, the two companies had reached an undisclosed agreement and were working to dismiss the cases.

  Krafton, meanwhile, looked to turn a game into a wider universe. Around July 2021, it quietly renamed the game PUBG: Battlegrounds. Starting in 2020, it released live-action documentaries starring Jonathan Frakes about the game's origins. In July 2021, before the Taego expansion, it released a short film called "Ground Zero" starring Ma Dong-seok. It also announced an animated series with Adi Shankar. A mobile spinoff, PUBG: New State, set in the year 2051, launched on the 11th of November 2021 and was renamed New State Mobile in January 2022.

  The strangest extension came from Striking Distance, a studio Krafton founded in 2019 under Glen Schofield, who had led development on the Dead Space series. It developed The Callisto Protocol, set in the PUBG universe but far in the future, on a prison colony built on Jupiter's moon Callisto.

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