PUBG has been facing a steady decline of PC players since January, but it looks like it’s not all down to the success of Fortnite.
Epic Games recently announced that their most popular game, Fortnite Battle Royale, had managed to hit a very impressive total of 125 million players across PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and iOS.
You may be wondering what PUBG’s total is? Well, it’s actually an eye-watering 400 million players across all platforms since launch back in March 2017. Which, you may have figured, is a solid six months prior to Fortnite’s launch. Plus, as Gamesradar points out, PUBG is available on Android.
Gamesradar then looked into the PC numbers. In January 2018, its peak player count on Steam was 3,236,027. While in June, it’s reached 1,750,216 so far.
The website also looked into the fact that PUBG has a lack of content, and PUBG is also concentrating on a more niche audience, as Fortnite also appeals to children as well as adults.
So sadly, it looks like although Fortnite has definitely contributed to its decline, it’s actually their reluctance to update their content as often as well as opening up to a larger audience.
This comes after PUBG decided to lift a little bit of inspiration from its biggest rival.
As we all know, Fortnite has a Battle Pass that you can buy for V-Bucks. V-Bucks are bought with your own real hard-earned cash, however this adds challenges that reward you with various cosmetics and even V-Bucks.
Obviously, this is on top of other in-game purchases you can make for character skins and so on. The end result being that Fortnite has really cashed in on their audience despite the game being free to play.
It looks like PUBG is wanting a piece of that sweet action as their mobile game’s patch 0.6.0 adds a Royale Pass that you can buy and rank up to earn various rewards, reports Toucharcade. There’s also an Elite option that unlocks more rewards on top of that.
As if that wasn’t enough, the new patch has also added first-person perspective.
#pubgmobile060imminent pic.twitter.com/Z0r2xJYA3d
— PUBG MOBILE (@PUBGMOBILE) 18 June 2018
This comes after the Game Director of PUBG said that he wants to ‘kill the critics’ of his game.
In the E3 Coliseum, game director Brendan Greene told Geoff Keighley that he wanted to ‘kill people that said PUBG was an asset flip’.
He explained: “Of course we use props from other places. We had to make a map within about nine months and you don’t do that without using work from other artists. But for the most part, most of our stuff is made by hand. So I see these comments and I’m like… ‘I want to kill you’.”
You can see the conversation here.
Ryan Rigney, communications lead on PUBG, took to Reddit to defend the game further.
In a lengthy post, he wrote: “The first thing to understand is that if you’re just starting up a team, you’ve got to lean on asset store work because that’s the only way you can spin up a game fast, and for a reasonable price, to quickly find the fun.
“Hiring an art team of 40 people to ‘try a game’ and ‘see if it’s fun’ is simply not a smart way to work—this is what the asset store is for! It’s a great resource for teams that want to work smart.
“From the beginning, our first map (Erangel) was a combination of in-house work at our HQ in Korea, some direct purchasing of assets, and outsourced art work from a team based in the American midwest. Basically, a few Americans built the Military Base on Erangel. That went so well that Korea decided to build a proper PUBG Corp. studio in Madison, Wisconsin for an in-house art team.”
He continued: “We also re-used some things from Erangel in Miramar. One of our lead artists (a guy called Dave) puts it this way:
“‘Why should one of my artists spend two weeks on a generic sculpt if they could instead spend that two weeks adding real value for players elsewhere? How many times should a telephone booth be modeled? How many times do we gotta sculpt a cash register?’
“Although a map like Miramar is a combination of in-house and external assets, the majority of the external assets are adjusted by our artists after the fact for visuals and for optimisation/performance.
“Because we’re steadily investing more and more in building our internal art teams (along with lots of other teams), Miramar used fewer external assets than Erangel, and Sanhok used fewer still. Our fourth map, the one coming out this winter, uses fewer still, but if we’re smart it’ll almost certainly still involve some mix of assets from different sources. This is a good thing.”
When Brendan Greene was asked by Geoff Keighley his thoughts on Fortnite, he said: “I have many thoughts”. Much to the amusement of the crowd.
“No, it’s great, I mean it’s great that the battle royale space is expanding, and that Fortnite is getting [the] battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That’s it, really.”