PUBG Is Still Insanely Popular
Despite losing ground on its competitor Fortnite, PUBG is still doing well. During a presentation over the weekend, Valve boss Gabe Newell said that the game is Steam’s third highest-selling game.
“You can have a relatively new game like PUBG, and […] they can capitalize on all the other multiplayer games, and all of the technology, [and] the fact that China is now a huge market for anybody who does PC game development,” he said. “So PUBG can come out of pretty much nowhere and become the third largest selling game on Steam’s history. Their gross revenue over all-time is already number three in fairly short order.”
Last we heard, PUBG sales were at 30 million. Although player figures have declined, the game is still incredibly popular.
“I didn’t understand the scale of China when I first started this,” said Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene, PUBG’s creator. “You hear things like, ‘Tencent’s WeChat has a billion users.’ A billion people use this single app in China. What the f**k? The literal scale of the player base in China is crazy. … It kind of blew me away.”
Greene also commented on the reaction of Western fans to the large portion of players from China.
“It’s quite disgraceful to see,” he said. “The Chinese player base is very passionate for Battlegrounds and they love our game. They’re the reason we have such a high number of concurrent users. Yes, there’s some cheaters that come out of there, but the majority of our Chinese players just love our game and love playing it.”
“This kind of xenophobic attitude that a lot of Western players seem to have online is just disgraceful. It’s 2017! We live on one big planet together! What the f**k? I’m quite ashamed of those players that shout these things out. We want to create a great space for everyone to enjoy across the globe and locking one region out … I don’t know what the f**k they’re thinking.”