This year has seen explosive growth in the so-called “battle royale” space and no game has been more prominent — or more
— than Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds.
What do I mean by popular? I’m writing this story on a Friday afternoon and more than a million people are playing online (according to Steamcharts). In August, Battlegrounds kicked Dota 2 out of the top spot on Steam, a position that Valve’s MOBA had held for years. It’s unlikely to surrender the spot anytime soon.
Battlegrounds isn’t just popular. It’s also very, very good. Critics in the game industry, including here at Polygon, are actively considering this unfinished, early access title for game of the year.
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is a last-man-standing multiplayer arena shooter. It blends elements of traditional survival games like DayZ with the fast-paced action and leaderboard of something like Counter-Strike. Around 100 players parachute onto the eight-square kilometer map, scavenge for supplies and fight to the death. The last one alive gets a “chicken dinner” filled with in-game currency. That is to say they get the pride of being #1 and a few virtual coins.
This isn’t a new game type. The battle royale genre has been around since roughly 2013. In fact, you could say that Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene is the one who invented it.
In June of 2016, I got an email from Greene about a new game he was working on. I was familiar with his Battle Royale mods for Arma 2 and Arma 3, and the work that he’d done consulting on 2015’s H1Z1 to help create its Battle Royale mode (which eventually became H1Z1: King of the Kill, before turning back into H1Z1 again).
Greene’s pitch: He was making the same kind of game, for a third time, but better.
As the game prepared for that launch, I kept an eye on it. Publisher Bluehole threw up a few servers early, and gave some of the best players of multiplayer survival games on Twitch access ahead of time. In the weeks and days leading up to the public release, I watched most of popular streamers in the survival shooter space migrate, almost en masse, over to that game exclusively.
The day after its launch, on March 24, Battlegrounds was the third-most-watched game on Twitch.
Driven by that dedicated, core group of streamers and their fans, the game took off. Less than one month later it had sold over one million copies, handily beating the pace set by by DayZ in 2013. Sitting across the table from Greene at this year’s E3, the man looked absolutely exhausted.
THE SWEAT OF HIS BROW
So far this year, it feels like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has stepped on every single landmine in the game industry.
First came the harassment.
After banning one of the game’s most popular streamers for team killing, which is specifically banned in the rules, a streamer known as Dr Disrespect threatened physical violence. Greene responded with a thoughtful response. “Consider that your words,” he wrote, “however flippant they may be [because they] could have unintended effects on those reading them.” The feud with the mustachio’d medical professional was brief, and has since subsided.
“I expected us to have some success,” he said, shrugging sheepishly. “I had confidence in my game mode, but three million in three months? … I’m just happy it’s stable and people can play it. That’s the main thing.”
