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164-487: PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds ) is a 2017 battle royale video game published by Krafton , and developed by Krafton's PUBG Studios . The game, which was inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), is based on previous mods created by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative direction. Played from either

328-675: A lawsuit against Epic in South Korea in January 2018 claiming Fortnite Battle Royale infringements on Battlegrounds ' copyrights . Market observers predicted that there would be little likelihood of Bluehole winning the case, as it would be difficult to establish the originality of PUBG in court due to itself being derived from Battle Royale . By the end of June 2018, the lawsuit had been closed by PUBG, under undisclosed reasons. In 2018, Fortnite Battle Royale rivaled Battlegrounds in player numbers and surpassed it in revenue, which

492-407: A mobile version, PUBG Mobile , for Android and iOS . The game is continuously developed under the games as a service model and has been free-to-play for all platforms since January 2022. The game received positive reviews from critics, who found that while the game had some technical flaws, it presented new types of gameplay that could be easily approached by players of any skill level and

656-466: A story within a story , wherein a narrator or character observing the telling of a story by another is reproduced in full, temporarily, and without interruption shifting narration to the speaker. The first-person narrator can also be the focal character. With a first-person narrative it is important to consider how the story is being told, i.e., is the character writing it down, telling it out loud, thinking it to themselves? And if they are writing it down,

820-516: A stream of consciousness and interior monologue , as in Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . The whole of the narrative can itself be presented as a false document , such as a diary, in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact that he is writing or telling a story. This is the case in Bram Stoker 's Dracula . As a story unfolds, narrators may be aware that they are telling

984-405: A third-person or first-person perspective, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island where they are tasked to scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill other players while avoiding getting killed themselves. The available safe area of the game's map decreases in size over time, directing surviving players into an ever-tightening space to force encounters. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

1148-521: A "huge build-up", keeping them "resolutely determined" until a match starts. The music for 6th anniversary was composed by Antti Martikainen. Development began in early 2016 and was publicly announced that June, with plans to have the game ready within a year. Kim served as executive producer for the game. Bluehole started with a team of about 35 developers supporting Greene's work, but had expanded to 70 by June 2017. Greene stated that many of these developers were voluntarily putting in longer work hours into

1312-439: A $ 350,000 prize pool. Separate events were held for solo players, two-player teams, two-player teams fixed to first-person perspective, and four-player squads. Each event featured three matches, with the player or team scoring the highest across all three named winners. Greene said that while he had envisioned the battle royale format to be a spectator sport since his ARMA II mod, their approach to making PUBG an esport would be

1476-555: A Grove (the source for the movie Rashomon ) and Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury . Each of these sources provides different accounts of the same event, from the point of view of various first-person narrators. There can also be multiple co-principal characters as narrator, such as in Robert A. Heinlein 's The Number of the Beast . The first chapter introduces four characters, including

1640-502: A Spanish developer. However, at Gamescom that year, Bluehole affirmed that Microsoft Studios would be publishing the Xbox One version of the title, helping to make a planned 2017 release for this version. Greene said that Microsoft's support has helped in several ways, not only for the Xbox One version but improving the performance and security of the Windows version. Further, by being part of

1804-734: A battle royale mobile game , Btooom Online , based on the 2009 manga Btooom , was developed and released in Japan. Despite some initial success on the Japanese mobile charts, Btooom Online was ultimately a commercial failure in Japan. While formative elements of the battle royale genre had been established before 2017, the genre grew from two principal titles through 2017 and 2018: PUBG: Battlegrounds , which soon inspired Fortnite Battle Royale . Both games drew tens of millions of players in short periods of time, proving them as commercial successes and leading to future growth after 2018. H1Z1: King of

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1968-530: A central location, but he moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and also to avoid copyright issues with the novels. In taking inspiration from the Battle Royale film, Greene had wanted to use square safe areas, but his inexperience in coding led him to use circular safe areas instead, which persisted to Battlegrounds . When DayZ became its own standalone title , interest in his ARMA 2 version of

2132-429: A combination of stories, experiences, and servants' gossip. As such, his character is an unintentionally very unreliable narrator and serves mainly to mystify, confuse, and ultimately leave the events of Wuthering Heights open to a great range of interpretations. A rare form of the first person is the first-person omniscient, in which the narrator is a character in the story, but also knows the thoughts and feelings of all

2296-574: A few years as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer, and played video games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America's Army . The DayZ mod caught his interest, both as a realistic military simulation and its open-ended gameplay, and he started playing around with a custom server, learning programming as he went along. Greene found most multiplayer first-person shooters too repetitive, considering maps small and easy to memorize. He wanted to create something with more random aspects so that players would not know what to expect, creating

2460-428: A first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre (1847), in which the title character is telling the story in which she herself is also the protagonist: "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me". Srikanta by Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is another first-person perspective novel which is often called a " masterpiece ". Srikanta ,

2624-399: A foreigner for a creative director role, and while it was a risk, he says that his relationship with Bluehole's management is strong, allowing Greene's team to work autonomously with minimal oversight. The game's main musical theme was composed by Tom Salta , who was personally selected by Greene as he and the team were looking for an "orchestral electronic hybrid theme" that would give players

2788-460: A full round takes no more than 30 minutes. At the completion of each round, players gain in-game currency based on their performance. The currency is used to purchase crates which contain cosmetic items for character or weapon customization. A rotating "event mode" was added to the game in March 2018. These events change up the normal game rules, such as establishing larger teams or squads, or altering

2952-585: A high degree of replayability; this was done by creating vastly larger maps that could not be easily memorized, and using random item placement across it. Greene was also inspired by an online competition for DayZ called Survivor GameZ , which featured a number of Twitch and YouTube streamers fighting until only a few were left; as he was not a streamer himself, Greene wanted to create a similar game mode that anyone could play. His initial efforts on this mod were more inspired by The Hunger Games novels, where players would try to vie for stockpiles of weapons at

3116-502: A horror game all in one", providing some of the "highest highs" in multiplayer gaming as reason for its popularity. Rob Zacny for Waypoint found that Battlegrounds offered the same type of entertainment experience for viewers that many other player-vs-player survival games have, but because of the lack of persistence, players were more likely to experiment with resources rather than hoard them, leading to humorous or unexpected situations that are often absent in survival games and making

3280-413: A hundred arrests by the beginning of 2018. Separately, this technical issue, in addition to the larger number of Chinese players, has created complaints in the player community. Some Western players fear that many Chinese players are able to cheat in the game by exploiting some of the network latency issues, something that PUBG Corporation continued to address as the game shifted out of early access. However,

3444-435: A large open-world map were popularized through survival games . The 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale , along with Koushun Takami 's earlier 1999 novel of the same name and its 2000 manga adaptation , set out the basic rules of the genre, including players being forced to kill each other until there is a single survivor, taking place on a shrinking map, and the need to scavenge for weapons and items. It soon inspired

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3608-583: A large player base for a game that was still in early access. Greene had confidence that the game could reach over a million players within a month, but some of his development team were only anticipating around 200,000 to 300,000 within the first year, and were surprised by its performance in its first month. Greene himself believed that the strong growth was buoyed by non-traditional promotional channels like Twitch streamers and other content creators, which they have since worked to introduce new gameplay elements ahead of public release. IGN 's Rad believed that

3772-439: A matter of taking "baby steps". Greene said that they would not actively pursue esports until after the game was fully released and that all major bugs were eliminated. The Gamescom 2017 event demonstrated the issues surrounding the logistics of running a large PUBG tournament with a large number of players involved, and they had worked alongside ESL to explore how to do this effectively in the future. Further, Greene stated there

3936-435: A multi-level narrative structure is Joseph Conrad 's novella Heart of Darkness , which has a double framework: an unidentified "I" (first person singular) narrator relates a boating trip during which another character, Marlow, uses the first person to tell a story that comprises the majority of the work. Within this nested story , it is mentioned that another character, Kurtz, told Marlow a lengthy story; however, its content

4100-466: A new genre called "chicken-eating game", named based on the congratulatory line to the last player standing in Battlegrounds , " Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! " The rapid growth and success of the battle royale genre has been attributed to several factors, including the way all players start in the same vulnerable state and eliminating any intrinsic advantage for players, and being well-suited for being

4264-497: A number of small squads (typically of 3-5 players). In each match, the goal is to be the last player or team standing by eliminating all other opponents. A match starts by placing the player-characters into a large map space, typically by having all players skydive from a large aircraft within a brief time limit. The map may have random distribution or allow players to have some control of where they start. All players start with minimal equipment, giving no player an implicit advantage at

4428-556: A partnership with Adi Shankar in July 2021 to develop an animated series based on the PUBG universe. In 2019, Krafton created a new studio Striking Distance, helmed by Glen Schofield , who previously led development on the Dead Space series. In 2020, Schofield revealed that the studio was working on The Callisto Protocol , a game set in the PUBG universe but in the far future, taking place on

4592-460: A prison colony established on Jupiter's moon Callisto . Krafton announced a new game in development named PUBG: New State . This particular game is separated from PUBG: Battlegrounds but taking place in the PUBG Universe . Pre-registrations were opened for the game on February 25, 2021. It was released on 11 November that year for iOS and Android . The game takes place in the year 2051 and

4756-704: A small number of players called for server segregation by region and had used racial insults at Chinese players they encountered in game. Greene was disappointed with this "xenophobic attitude", calling it "disgraceful", and asked the player community to respect the Chinese players more as their numbers were a key part of the game's success. Greene also identified that players can easily get around such region locks using virtual private networks , making this approach ineffective. PUBG Corporation eventually added region-based matchmaking by October 2018, though players still reported issues with connectivity and slow matchmaking. PUBG Lite

4920-500: A smaller map made for 60 players, PUBG Mobile Lite , was released on July 25, 2019. This had support for high FPS gameplay on multiple Android devices. The Chinese version of the app was again renamed to Peacekeeper Elite in 2020. Support for 90 FPS gameplay was added for selected OnePlus devices in August 2020. On May 6, 2021, Krafton announced the relaunch of the game in India , following

5084-473: A spectator esport. Other factors including specific games' business models, such as Fortnite Battle Royale being free and available across computers, consoles, and mobile devices. A University of Utah professor also considers that battle royale games realize elements of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs , a scheme to describe human motivation, more-so than video games have in the past. While the lowest tiers of Maslow's hierarchy, physiological and safety, are met by

PUBG: Battlegrounds - Misplaced Pages Continue

5248-530: A story and of their reasons for telling it. The audience that they believe they are addressing can vary. In some cases, a frame story presents the narrator as a character in an outside story who begins to tell their own story, as in Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein . First-person narrators are often unreliable narrators since a narrator might be impaired (such as both Quentin and Benjy in Faulkner's The Sound and

5412-419: A story is told will also affect how it is written. Why is this narrator telling the story in this way, why now, and are they to be trusted? Unstable or malevolent narrators can also lie to the reader. Unreliable narrators are not uncommon. In the first-person-plural point of view , narrators tell the story using "we". That is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as

5576-474: A success as everything listed had been implemented by then. In March 2019, Greene announced that he was stepping down as the game's lead designer, but would still serve as a creative consultant. Tae-seok Jang, the game's art director, would replace him, with Green relocating to PUBG's studio in Amsterdam, PUBG Special Projects. Greene stated that he believed the main PUBG team was at a place to continue developing

5740-500: A successful game in South Korea generally meant it would be published globally, and wanted to use his team to create a successful title for personal computers that followed the same model as other mobile games published by Bluehole. He had already been excited about making a type of battle royale game after he had played DayZ , in part that the format had not caught on in Korea. He also wanted to make this through an early access model and have

5904-547: A total playerbase of 45 million in January and 3.4 million concurrent players in February. Polygon labeled it "the biggest game of 2018" and "a genuine cultural phenomenon", with "everyone from NFL players to famous actors" playing it, including Red Sox player Xander Bogaerts and Bayern Munich 's youth team borrowing celebrations from the game. In Asia , however, PUBG remains the most popular battle royale game. Other popular battle royale games released in 2017, inspired by

6068-728: A unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about. Examples include: Other examples include Twenty-Six Men and a Girl by Maxim Gorky , The Treatment of Bibi Haldar by Jhumpa Lahiri , During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase , Our Kind by Kate Walbert , I, Robot by Isaac Asimov , and We Didn't by Stuart Dybek . First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa 's In

6232-489: A very limited development schedule to get the game out as quickly as possible, while treating the product as a " games as a service " model to be able to support it for many years. In researching what had been done, he came across Greene's mods and reached out to him. In July 2017, Bluehole partnered with social media platform Facebook to provide exclusive streaming content to Facebook's gaming channels, as part of their push to provide more gaming content for its users. Around

6396-571: A wave of battle royale themed Japanese manga and anime , such as Gantz (2000), Future Diary (2006), and Btooom! (2009), and then the battle royale formula eventually appeared in The Hunger Games franchise. Fictional battle royale video games were depicted in Btooom! , and in the Phantom Bullet ( Gun Gale Online ) arc of the light novel series Sword Art Online (2010 in print) as

6560-565: A year to reach similar sales figures while it was in its paid-beta development period. By September 2017, Bluehole's value, as tracked by a firm that tracks private Korean corporations, increased five-fold from June of that year to US$ 4.6 billion , primarily due to Battlegrounds . By December 2017, PUBG Corporation reported that there were more than 30 million players worldwide between the Windows and Xbox versions. The research firm SuperData estimated that Battlegrounds drew in more than US$ 712 million in revenue within 2017. By February 2018,

6724-403: Is 50-versus-50 player mode in its Fortnite Battle Royale free-to-play game; players are assigned one of the two teams, and work with their teammates to collect resources and weapons towards constructing fortifications as the safe area of the game shrinks down, with the goal to eliminate all the players on the other team. Formulative elements of the battle royale genre had existed prior to

PUBG: Battlegrounds - Misplaced Pages Continue

6888-627: Is a 2019 game released by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch that has 99 players simultaneously competing in a game of Tetris . Players can direct "attacks" on other players for each line they complete, attempting to remain the last player standing. Tetris 99 served as a template for the Switch games Super Mario Bros. 35 , Pac-Man 99 , and F-Zero 99 . Blizzard Entertainment added a battle royale-inspired "Battlegrounds" mode to its digital card game Hearthstone , where eight players vie to win over

7052-530: Is based on future warfare. On January 27, 2022, the title name changed from " PUBG: New State " to " New State Mobile ". Battlegrounds received "generally favorable reviews" on all platforms, with the exception of the PlayStation 4 version which received "mixed or average reviews", according to review aggregator website Metacritic . During both its early access phase and after, the game also surpassed numerous player-count records. Bluehole released statistics for

7216-413: Is considered to be one of the highest-grossing video games of all time. PUBG is a player versus player shooter game in which up to one hundred players fight in a battle royale , a type of large-scale last man standing deathmatch where players fight to remain the last alive. Players can choose to enter the match solo, duo, or with a small team of up to four people. The last person or team alive wins

7380-678: Is for the main detective principal assistant, the "Watson", to be the narrator: this derives from the character of Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. First-person narratives can appear in several forms; interior monologue, as in Fyodor Dostoevsky 's Notes from Underground ; dramatic monologue, also in Albert Camus ' The Fall ; or explicitly, as Mark Twain 's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Other forms include temporary first-person narration as

7544-400: Is it something meant to be read by the public, a private diary, or a story meant for one other person? The way the first-person narrator is relating the story will affect the language used, the length of sentences, the tone of voice, and many other things. A story presented as a secret diary could be interpreted much differently than a public statement. First-person narratives can tend towards

7708-419: Is not revealed to readers. Thus, there is an "I" narrator introducing a storyteller as "he" (Marlow), who talks about himself as "I" and introduces another storyteller as "he" (Kurtz), who in turn presumably told his story from the perspective of "I". First-person narration is more difficult to achieve in film; however, voice-over narration can create the same structure. An example of first-person narration in

7872-408: Is over when only one player or team remains, and the game typically provides some type of reward, such as in-game currency used for cosmetic items, to all players based on how long they survived. The random nature of starting point, item placement, and safe area reduction enables the battle royale genre to challenge players to think and react quickly and improve strategies throughout the match as to be

8036-414: The Battle Royale formula into a shooter game format. Shortly after the release of the 2012 film The Hunger Games , which had a similar premise to Battle Royale , a server plug-in named Hunger Games (later changed to Survival Games) was developed for Minecraft . Survival Games takes inspiration from the film, initially placing players at the center of the map near a set of equipment chests. When

8200-526: The Battle Royale mod trailed off, and Greene transitioned development of the mod to ARMA 3 . Sony Online Entertainment (now the Daybreak Game Company ) had become interested in Greene's work, and brought him on as a consultant to develop on H1Z1 , licensing the battle royale idea from him. In February 2016, Sony Online split H1Z1 into two separate games, the survival mode H1Z1: Just Survive , and

8364-548: The Chinese government revamped how it reviewed and classified games that are to be published in China, and by December 2018, after the formation of the new Online Ethics Review Committee, several battle royale titles, including Fortnite and PUBG , were listed as prohibited or must be withdrawn from play. While PUBG Corporation was working with Tencent on a Chinese release, many clones of Battlegrounds were released in China, and created

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8528-472: The Gamers Outreach Foundation , with Bluehole matching all donations up to US$ 100,000 . The competition ran in early May 2017, and raised at least US$ 120,000 from viewers along with Bluehole's US$ 100,000 match, and served as a prototype for future esports events for the game. During the August 2017 Gamescom event, Bluehole and ESL organized the first PUBG invitational tournament, with

8692-672: The Great Depression era. Greene also introduced microtransactions that allow players to use real-world funds to purchase loot crates that provide randomly-selected cosmetic items, also known as "skins", which they can trade with other players; while Greene recognizes the issue with skin gambling , he believes that Valve has put safeguards in place to support a "skin economy" that will provide further revenue for them without concerns over gambling. However, by November 2017, gray market skin gambling sites began to appear that used PUBG cosmetics as virtual currency . Following controversy over

8856-743: The PlayStation 4 . In an interview shortly after Gamescom, Greene said that their deal with Microsoft did not exclude a PlayStation 4 port, but that their focus at the time was only on the Windows and Xbox One version, given the small size of their team. When asked about it in January 2018, Kim stated that the team released the game first on the Steam and Xbox Game Preview early access programs as they both easily allowed in-development games to be released and updated over time, which contrasted with Sony's lack of their own early access program, as well as their strict quality control for even completed games. The PlayStation port

9020-646: The novel of the same name , which presents a similar theme of a last-man-standing competition in a shrinking play zone. The genre's origins arose from mods for large-scale online survival games like Minecraft and ARMA 2 in the early 2010s. By the end of the decade, the genre became a cultural phenomenon, with standalone games such as PUBG: Battlegrounds (2017), Fortnite Battle Royale (2017), Apex Legends (2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (2020) each having received tens of millions of players within months of their releases. Battle royale games are played between many individual players, pairs of players, or

9184-464: The "Bullet of Bullets" tournament. Initial attempts at adapting the Battle Royale formula into video games came in the form of Japanese visual novel games that focused on storytelling and puzzle-solving, such as Higurashi: When They Cry (2002), Zero Escape (2009) and Danganronpa (2010). However, these visual novel games are distinct from the genre which became known as battle royale games, which emerged when Western developers later adapted

9348-422: The 2010s. Gameplay modes featuring last man standing rules has been a frequent staple of multiplayer online action games, though generally with fewer total players, as early as 1990's Bomberman , which introduced multiplayer game modes with players all starting with the same minimal abilities who collected power ups and fought until the last player was left standing. The elements of scavenging and surviving on

9512-522: The China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association issued a statement in October 2017 that discouraged battle royale-style games, stating that they are too violent and deviate from Chinese values of socialism, deeming it harmful to young consumers. The following month however, PUBG had reached a formal agreement with the Chinese government to allow the release of the game in the country, with Tencent as

9676-498: The Erangel map felt disjointed despite meeting their goals for gameplay, and sought to create more unified ideas with future maps. The freefall from an airplane at the start of each match was a new feature for the genre, encouraging strategy between staying with the pack of players or seeking out one's own route for a better chance at finding good loot. With the added parachute drop, Greene considered that PUBG had three distinct subgames:

9840-791: The Fury ), lie (as in The Quiet American by Graham Greene , or The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe ), or manipulate their own memories intentionally or not (as in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro , or in Ken Kesey 's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ). Henry James discusses his concerns about "the romantic privilege of the 'first person ' " in his preface to The Ambassadors , calling it "the darkest abyss of romance ." One example of

10004-593: The Kill, which predated these two titles in the genre, had become a fixture in the top most played games on Steam by the start of 2017, but was not able to maintain its playerbase. PUBG: Battlegrounds was created by Brendan Greene, its title based on his online alias "PlayerUnknown". The game was based on his previous Battle Royale mod for ARMA 2 and DayZ first released in 2013. Building on his earlier work, Greene went to work at Bluehole in South Korea , becoming

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10168-495: The United States, according to The NPD Group . By March 2018, the game had sold forty million copies across all platforms, which had risen to over fifty million by June, averaging over 87 million players daily with over 400 million players in total. The mobile version had over 100 million downloads by August 2018, and exceeded 225   million by October 2018, a figure higher than the combined player base for Fortnite at nearly

10332-586: The Xbox Live Preview Program in mid-December 2017, Microsoft announced that Battlegrounds had sold more than a million copies on the platform. Alongside this, Microsoft announced that Battlegrounds would be offered as a free add-on for those buying the Xbox One X console through the end of 2017. A month after release, the Xbox version had sold more than four million copies and was the fourth bestselling game in

10496-462: The Xbox Series X version will feature a consistent 60 FPS gameplay while the Xbox Series S version features a 30 FPS gameplay, however they've also claimed the framerate cap will be raised in the near future. The game also features account transition and cross-platform play. With the announcement of the Xbox release, PUBG Corporation stated that there were plans to port to additional platforms, such as

10660-406: The actual writer of that book and playing the part of James Kirk (Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek ) as he wrote the novel. Since the narrator is within the story, he or she may not have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, the first-person narrative is often used for detective fiction , so that the reader and narrator uncover the case together. One traditional approach in this form of fiction

10824-507: The advantage keyboard and mouse-using players would have over those using controllers. Titled "Game Preview Edition", the early access version for the Xbox One was released on December 12, 2017, in both digital and physical formats. To promote it, Microsoft performed real-life supply crate drops in Australia in the week prior, with the crates containing Xbox hardware, Battlegrounds merchandise, and other goods, using passcodes published alongside

10988-447: The airdrop during which one must quickly figure out the best time to jump and where to land in relationship to the other players, the loot game of knowing where and how to gather the best possible equipment, and the combat game with other players. Winners of a match are greeted with the phrase "winner winner chicken dinner", an idiom that Greene had used in his prior battle royale games and kept in PUBG , which itself had origins as early as

11152-546: The author). In some cases, the narrator is writing a book—"the book in your hands"—and therefore he has most of the powers and knowledge of the author. Examples include The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco , and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon . Another example is a fictional "Autobiography of James T. Kirk" which was "Edited" by David A. Goodman who was

11316-509: The ban imposed by the Government of India . Krafton directly published the game instead of Tencent as a newly named title which could only be accessed by users in India as Battlegrounds Mobile India . To celebrate the game surpassing two million copies sold, Bluehole announced a 2017 Charity Invitational event, inviting 128 players to compete over their official Twitch channel to raise money for

11480-623: The battle royale genre expanded greatly. Major publishers, including Electronic Arts Activision , and Ubisoft acknowledged the impact of the growing genre on their future plans and on the industry as a whole. Activision's Call of Duty series features a battle royale mode titled Blackout in its 2018 installment, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 , as does EA's Battlefield V . Other established games added battle royale-inspired game modes in updates, such as Grand Theft Auto Online , Paladins , Dota 2 , Battlerite , and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive . In February 2019, EA released

11644-485: The battle royale-like H1Z1: King of the Kill , around the same time that Greene's consultation period was over. Separately, the Seoul -based studio Ginno Games, led by Chang-han Kim and who developed massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) for personal computers, was acquired and renamed Bluehole Ginno Games by Bluehole in January 2015, a major South Korean publisher of MMOs and mobile games . Kim recognized that producing

11808-496: The core game as to expand the narrative universe. As part of this, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was quietly rebranded as PUBG: Battlegrounds around July 2021. Starting in 2020, Krafton released a series of live-action documentaries starring Jonathan Frakes that explored the origins of the game's Battlegrounds. Ahead of the game's Taego expansion in July 2021, Krafton released another live-action short called "Ground Zero", featuring Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee). Krafton announced

11972-596: The course of the match, random regions of the map are highlighted in red and bombed, posing a threat to players who remain in that area. In both cases, players are warned a few minutes before these events, giving them time to relocate to safety. A plane will fly over various parts of the playable map occasionally at random, or wherever a player uses a flare gun , and drop a loot package, containing items which are typically unobtainable during normal gameplay. These packages emit highly visible red smoke, drawing interested players near it and creating further confrontations. On average,

12136-400: The creative developer of a standalone game representing his vision of the battle royale genre, PUBG: Battlegrounds . While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million copies by the end of the year, and is considered the defining game of the genre. In September 2017, the game broke

12300-533: The distribution of weapons and armor across the game map. The game's concept and design was led by Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, who had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale , an offshoot of popular mod DayZ , and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale . At the time he created DayZ: Battle Royale , around 2013, Irish-born Greene had been living in Brazil for

12464-491: The double-digits by May 2018, leading Outpost to announce the game's closure by November 2018. While several major battle royale announcements occurred at E3 in 2018, only Fallout 76 ' s battle royale mode appeared at the trade show in 2019. The Chinese government , through its Audio and Video and Numeral Publishing Association, stated in October 2017 that it will discourage its citizens from playing battle royale games as they deem them too violent, which "deviates from

12628-578: The drop locations on social media. The Xbox version also includes Xbox-specific in-game cosmetic items, some of which could be purchased directly rather than through in-game crates. The official release out of the Game Preview program occurred on September 4, 2018. Xbox Series X/S version and PlayStation 5 version releases were announced via a post on the office website. The game launched on November 10, 2020, in Xbox Series X/S. PUBG Corporation confirmed

12792-427: The early access period by a few months, continuing to release updates on a regular basis, with plans to still release by the end of 2017, as committing to this original period "could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met". Initially, Bluehole had expected that they would just gain enough players through early access to smooth out

12956-826: The end of 2019. SuperData Research reported that, in 2018 , the three top-grossing battle royale games ( Fortnite , PUBG and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 ) generated nearly $ 4 billion in combined digital revenue that year. SuperData Research reported that the top four highest-grossing battle royale games of 2020 ( PUBG Mobile , Garena Free Fire , Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite ) generated more than $ 7 billion worldwide in combined digital revenue that year. Fortnite grossed over $ 9 billion worldwide by 2019, while PUBG Mobile grossed over $ 8 billion by early 2022. Sensor Tower reported that 2018's top three most-downloaded mobile battle royale games ( PUBG Mobile , Garena Free Fire and Fortnite ) received over 500   million downloads combined that year. As of 2020 ,

13120-436: The events of the story and when they decided to tell them. If only a few days have passed, the story could be related very differently than if the character was reflecting on events of the distant past. The character's motivation is also relevant. Are they just trying to clear up events for their own peace of mind? Make a confession about a wrong they did? Or tell a good adventure tale to their beer-guzzling friends? The reason why

13284-403: The first four months of release that showed that over ten million rounds of Battlegrounds had been played, effectively equal to more than 25,000 man-years of time. Data by SteamSpy showed that Battlegrounds had surpassed long-standing popular titles in concurrent player count on Steam, such as Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V , eventually overtaking Dota 2 , the most played game on

13448-518: The first-person narrator is the character of the author (with varying degrees of historical accuracy). The narrator is still distinct from the author and must behave like any other character and any other first-person narrator. Examples of this kind of narrator include Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in Timequake (in this case, the first-person narrator is also

13612-623: The free-to-play Apex Legends , which exceeded 50 million player accounts within a month. The second main battle royale installment in the Call of Duty franchise, titled Call of Duty: Warzone , was released in March 2020, as a part of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game but does not require purchase of it; the game reached more than 50 million players in its first month of release. The battle royale approach has also been used in games from genres not normally associated with shooter games. Tetris 99

13776-485: The fundamental gameplay of Battlegrounds appeared in China , shortly after Battlegrounds ' release. Epic Games had released Fortnite , a cooperative survival game, into early access near the release of Battlegrounds . Epic saw the potential to create their own battle royale mode, and by September 2017, released the free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale which combined some of the survival elements and mechanics from

13940-443: The game commences, players can compete over the central resources or spread out to find items stored in chests scattered around the play area. Players killed are eliminated and the last surviving player wins the match. In DayZ , a mod for Arma 2 , released in August 2012, players struggle alongside or against each other to obtain basic necessities to continue living in a persistent sandbox filled with various dangers. The mod

14104-491: The game due to their dedication to the project, and not by any mandate from himself or Bluehole's management. In addition to Bluehole, Greene also credits Bohemia Interactive , the developers of ARMA and DayZ , for support with motion capture animations via their Prague studio. With the rapid growth of interest in the game, Bluehole spun out the entire development for PUBG into Bluehole Ginno Games in September 2017, which

14268-462: The game encouraged players to engage due to the situation they are placed in rather than from the player's own disposition, comparing it to the Stanford prison experiment , and thus the game is able to capture the interest of players who may normally eschew these types of games. Rock Paper Shotgun 's Michael Johnson described Battlegrounds as "a tactical shooting sandbox, a story generator, and

14432-447: The game had sold over thirty million on Steam according to Steam Spy . The following month, Steam's President Gabe Newell stated that the game was the third highest-grossing game of all time on the platform. PUBG: Battlegrounds is the best-selling video game on PC and on Xbox One . Before the release of the PlayStation 4 version, 42 million copies were sold on PC and 9 million copies on Xbox One. Within three days of going live on

14596-589: The game in the direction he had set to keep the game unique among the other battle royale games it had launched, and he wanted to try something not tied to battle royale but still multiplayer-based. The move also put him closer to his family in Ireland. With the success of PUBG , Bluehole created Krafton as a holding company for its video game assets and studios in 2018, taking over the publishing duties for PUBG and related games. By December 2020, Krafton merged PUBG Corporation into their internal studio system, rebranding

14760-488: The game progresses, usually taking the form of a gradually shrinking safe zone, with players outside the zone facing elimination. Typically, battle royale contestants are only given one life , and any players who die are rarely allowed to respawn . Games with team support may allow players to enter a temporary, not permanent, near-death state once health is depleted, giving allies the opportunity to revive them before they give out or are finished off by an opponent. The match

14924-407: The game to spectators, as they wish for it to become a popular esport . It has sold over 75 million copies on personal computers and game consoles , is the best-selling game on PC and on Xbox One , and is the fifth best-selling video game of all time . Until Q3 2022, the game has accumulated $ 13 billion in worldwide revenue, including from the more successful mobile version of the game, and it

15088-627: The game was developed in China . Based on Greene's experience with the genre, an island with many terrain features was picked as the first map, known as "Erangel". The map design scope was to offer players many possible options for strategic and unique gameplay. Some buildings and structures were designed to depict the style of the brutalist architecture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The developer team playtested architecture features and random item placement systems, looking at both how close-quarters encounters went and open terrain areas. The goal

15252-463: The game's gunplay, saying the game "has taken the military-sim gameplay... [and] boiled it down to its most exciting parts." Battlegrounds made US$ 11 million in the first three days of its Windows early access release in March 2017. By the second week of April, the game had sold over one million copies, with a peak player count of 89,000, SuperData Research estimated that the game's April sales exceeded US$ 34 million , putting it as one of

15416-412: The game, and players could experience a consistent 60 FPS gameplay, account transition and support for cross-platform play. Cross-platform play support between the Xbox and PlayStation versions of PUBG was added in October 2019 following a testing period during the prior month. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds – Pioneer Edition was released on the streaming service Stadia on April 28, 2020. The game

15580-546: The game. Babble Royale is a game developed by Frank Lantz that uses Scrabble as a basis for a word-based battle royale game. As of December 2019 dozens of battle royale games have debuted but, similar to the MOBA genre, only two or three titles have maintained mainstream popularity at the same time. Other games and battle royale modes had briefly become popular before their concurrent player count dropped and players returned to Fortnite or Battlegrounds ; Apex Legends

15744-472: The gameplay and adjust balance prior to a wider release. Just prior to the early access phase on Steam , Bluehole opened a few servers and invited some popular live streamers of similar games to try it out as to start gaining interest. Early access for the Windows version launched on March 23, 2017. This period was planned to last approximately six months, originally aiming for a September 2017 release. In July 2017, Greene announced that they would need to extend

15908-493: The gameplay, and only when the game was completed, they would have started more marketing for the title. The sudden interest in the game from early access exceeded their expectations, and put emphasis on the stability of the game and its underlying networking alongside gameplay improvements. Through August 2017, these updates generally included a major weekly patch alongside major monthly updates that provided key performance improvements. However, from August onward, Bluehole backed off

16072-470: The group of studios under the Microsoft banner, they have been able to talk and incorporate technology from other developers, such as improved water rendering techniques they obtained from Rare that they had developed for Sea of Thieves . Microsoft considered PUBG to be an important project to demonstrate their company's ability to be more than just a publisher, according to Microsoft's Nico Bihary who lead

16236-438: The initial narrator, who is named at the beginning of the chapter. The narrative continues in subsequent chapters with a different character explicitly identified as the narrator for that chapter. Other characters later introduced in the book also have their "own" chapters where they narrate the story for that chapter. The story proceeds in a linear fashion, and no event occurs more than once, i.e. no two narrators speak "live" about

16400-401: The issues with latency problems and prevent some of the cheating that has occurred. This would not prevent cross-region matchmaking but may make it difficult for some players to play outside their region if they have a poor Internet infrastructure. Tencent has also helped by identifying and reporting around 30 software programs to Chinese police that can be used to cheat in PUBG , leading to over

16564-405: The last man/team standing. In addition to standalone games, the battle royale concept may also be present as part of one of many game modes within a larger game, or may be applied as a user-created mod created for another game. There are various modifications that can be implemented atop the fundamentals of the battle royale. For example, Fortnite introduced a temporary mode in an event which

16728-680: The lead animator to help with the zombie animations. Greene sees PUBG as a platform, and would like to see more custom game types and mods developed by players for it. Greene identified that some mods that he also previously worked on from ARMA 3 may become part of the Battlegrounds platform. Greene also wants to incorporate streaming services like Twitch into the game that would enable features supporting Battlegrounds' development as an esport , calling this an "ultimate end goal" for his development, but he wanted to let it progress naturally with players. Bluehole used closed alpha and beta periods with about 80,000 players to gauge initial reaction to

16892-793: The main Fortnite game with the Battle Royale gameplay concept. The game saw similar player counts as Battlegrounds , with twenty million unique players reported by Epic Games by November 2017. Bluehole expressed concern at this move, less due to being a clone of Battlegrounds , but more so that they had been working with Epic Games for technical support of the Unreal Engine in Battlegrounds , and thus they were worried that Fortnite may be able to include planned features to their battle royale mode before they could release those in Battlegrounds . Battleground 's developer, PUBG Corporation , filed

17056-467: The map at the start of a match, with certain high-risk zones typically having better equipment. Killed players can be looted to acquire their gear as well. Players can opt to play either from the first-person or third-person perspective , each having their own advantages and disadvantages in combat and situational awareness; though server-specific settings can be used to force all players into one perspective to eliminate some advantages. Every few minutes,

17220-428: The map. Greene recreated this mod for Arma 3 in 2014. Greene continued to use his format as a consultant for H1Z1: King of the Kill before becoming the creative developer at Bluehole of a standalone game representing his vision of the battle royale genre, which would later be released as PUBG: Battlegrounds . Games from other developers took inspiration from highly played battle royale-style mods, as well as

17384-569: The match. Each match starts with players parachuting from a plane onto one of the eight maps which have different sizes and terrain. The plane's flight path across the map varies with each round, requiring players to quickly determine the best time to eject and parachute to the ground. Players start with no gear beyond customized clothing selections which do not affect gameplay. Once they land, players can search buildings, ghost towns and other sites to find weapons, vehicles, armor, and other equipment. These items are procedurally distributed throughout

17548-471: The most-played battle royale games include PUBG Mobile with 600   million players, Fortnite with 350   million players, NetEase 's mobile game Knives Out with over 250   million players, Rules of Survival with 230   million players, and Garena Free Fire with over 180   million players. Turtle Beach Corporation , a manufacturer of headphones and microphones for gaming, reported an increase of over 200% in net revenues for

17712-427: The narrative through the perspective of a particular character. The reader or audience sees the story through the narrator's views and knowledge only. The narrator is an imperfect witness by definition, because they do not have a complete overview of events. Furthermore, they may be pursuing some hidden agenda (an " unreliable narrator "). Character weaknesses and faults, such as tardiness, cowardice, or vice, may leave

17876-512: The narrator in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë ; and the unnamed narrator in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad . Skilled writers choose to skew narratives, in keeping with the narrator's character, to an arbitrary degree, from ever so slight to extreme. For example, the aforementioned Mr. Lockwood is quite naive, of which fact he appears unaware, simultaneously rather pompous, and recounting

18040-399: The narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason. A story written in the first person is most often told by the main character, but may also be told from the perspective of a less important character as they witness events, or a person retelling a story they were told by someone else. First-person narration presents

18204-424: The narrator unintentionally absent or unreliable for certain key events. Specific events may further be colored or obscured by a narrator's background since non-omniscient characters must by definition be laypersons and foreigners to some circles, and limitations such as poor eyesight and illiteracy may also leave important blanks. Another consideration is how much time has elapsed between when the character experienced

18368-403: The next PlayerUnknown". This was aided by a quiet release of custom server support to a number of influential streamers which subsequently made it into public release. In one case, "Zombie Mode", all but four players pretend to be zombies , who may sometimes distinguish themselves by removing all clothing and are limited only to collecting melee weapons and consumable items, and must rush to attack

18532-582: The onset. Equipment, usually used for combat, survival or transport is randomly scattered around the map, often at landmarks on the map, such as within buildings in ghost towns . Players need to search the map for these items while avoiding being killed by other players, who cannot be visually marked or distinguishable either on-screen or on the map, requiring the player to solely use their own eyes and ears to deduce their positions. Equipment from eliminated players can usually be looted as well. These games often include some mechanic to push opponents closer together as

18696-536: The original Battle Royale film. Greene anticipates adding a campaign mode with co-operative player support, though there would be "no serious lore" crafted for the narrative, comparing this to similar modes in Watch Dogs . The game also features custom gamemodes and modding support. He considered modding support an essential part of the full release as, just as he had his start with mods, he wants to enable others to create variations on his game so that he could "find

18860-457: The other characters. It can seem like third-person omniscient at times. A reasonable explanation fitting the mechanics of the story's world is generally provided or inferred unless its glaring absence is a major plot point. Three notable examples are The Book Thief by Markus Zusak , where the narrator is Death , From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , where the narrator is

19024-402: The other four players, who are able to collect all gear and attempt to outrun and defeat the zombies. Inspired by this mode, Greene announced plans to introduce an official zombie-based gameplay mode based on this into PUBG . Whereas most of the rest of the team continued to develop the core gameplay and maps, Greene is taking on the zombie mode as a near solo project, only using the assistance of

19188-409: The others through several rounds of drafting new cards and fighting in one-on-one events. The racing game Forza Horizon 4 from Playground Games added a battle royale mode called "The Eliminator" where players all start with the same car, but can gain upgrades by beating other players and discovering "drops" around the map; Microsoft stated in 2021 that it was the most popular multiplayer mode in

19352-511: The outfit of Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series, and Ellie 's backpack from The Last of Us . A short live-action film to promote the PlayStation 4 release was directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts and starred Jason Mitchell . The PlayStation 5 version of the game was released along with the PlayStation 5 console on November 12, 2020. The publisher claimed those who purchased the game on PlayStation 4 will be able to freely upgrade and download

19516-539: The platform for years, in August 2017. The following month, the game had its peak concurrent player count reach over 1.3 million, surpassing Dota 2 's all-time record of 1.29 set in March 2016. The game then reached a concurrent player count of two million in October 2017, and three million by the end of the year. The game has also been shown popular in South Korean PC bangs ; analysis firm Gametrics reported that Battlegrounds had surpassed Overwatch and became

19680-404: The playable area of the map begins to shrink down towards a random location, with any player caught outside the safe area taking damage incrementally, and eventually being eliminated if the safe zone is not entered in time; in game, the players see the boundary as a shimmering blue wall that contracts over time. This results in a more confined map, in turn increasing the chances of encounters. During

19844-462: The popularity of The Hunger Games film series . Ark: Survival Evolved by Studio Wildcard introduced its "Survival of the Fittest" mode in July 2015, which was geared to be used for esports tournaments. The mode was temporarily broken off as its own free-to-play game during 2016 before the developers opted to merge it back into the main game for ease of maintenance of the overall game. In 2016,

20008-494: The popularity of the game was due to its fast-paced nature compared to similar type games available at the time, such as H1Z1 and DayZ . She thought that the design balanced the solitary periods when the player is scavenging or sneaking around with those of being in combat with others, and the approach is readily accessible to new players with very little waiting time to get into a new match. Andy Moore for Glixel considered that Battlegrounds ' popularity comes from how

20172-409: The previous record for highest number of concurrent players on Steam , with over 1.3 million users playing the game simultaneously. Battlegrounds ' explosive growth and how it established the battle royale genre was considered one of the top trends in the video game industry in 2017. Battlegrounds ' popularity created a new interest in the battle royale genre. Numerous games that copied

20336-457: The project. Bihary said they have given PUBG a "white glove" treatment, and for the Xbox One port, they have provided services from their advanced technology group and time and support from The Coalition , another of Microsoft Studios' subsidiaries. Kim also stated that the team was interested in cross-platform play between the Windows and console versions, but did not anticipate this as a release feature, as they need to determine how to mitigate

20500-544: The publishing partner. However, some changes were made to make sure it aligned with socialist values and traditional Chinese morals. In South Korea, the game is marketed and distributed by Kakao Games . Despite the lack of a Chinese publisher prior to the Tencent deal, players in China had found ways to acquire and play the game through Steam via proxies and other networking tricks. To address it, PUBG Corporation planned to add maximum client ping limits for servers which can reduce

20664-516: The rate of such patches, as the high frequency has led to some quality control issues, and the developers rather make sure each patch content is well-vetted by the community before providing new updates; this did not change their plans for a 2017 release, where it fully released out of early access on December 20. In part of the game's success in early access, Tencent Games , the largest publisher of video games in China, approached Bluehole that same month with an offer to publish PUBG in China. However,

20828-475: The reader's initial assumptions. An example of the telling of a story in the grammatical first person, i.e. from the perspective of "I", is Herman Melville 's Moby-Dick , which begins with "Call me Ishmael." First-person narration may sometimes include an embedded or implied audience of one or more people. The story may be told by a person directly undergoing the events in the story without being aware of conveying that experience to readers; alternatively,

20992-560: The release of Battlegrounds , The Culling lost much of its player base, and a few months after releasing the full version of the game, Xaviant announced they were ending further development on it to move onto other projects. Radical Heights by Boss Key Productions was launched in April 2018 but within two weeks had lost 80% of its player base. SOS , a battle royale game released by Outpost Games in December 2017, had its player counts drop into

21156-718: The same event. The first-person narrator may be the principal character (e.g., Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels ), someone very close to them who is privy to their thoughts and actions ( Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes stories) or one who closely observes the principal character (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby ). These can be distinguished as "first-person major" or "first-person minor" points of view. Narrators can report others' narratives at one or more removes. These are called "frame narrators": examples are Mr. Lockwood,

21320-632: The same point in time. In 2018, the bulk of these players were in Asian countries such as China and India, where PUBG Mobile was released before Fortnite and could run on lower-powered mobile hardware. China was the game's largest player base. PUBG was the most popular online game in India in 2018 (but it was banned by the government of India in 2020; see below ). PUBG was the top-selling PC paid game of 2017, having sold 30   million copies worldwide and grossed about $ 900 million . By June 2018, it had sold more than 50   million copies worldwide. PUBG

21484-421: The same time that Greene left Sony Online, Kim contacted and offered him the opportunity to work on a new battle royale concept. Within a week, Greene flew out to Bluehole's headquarters in Korea to discuss the options, and a few weeks later, he became the creative director of Bluehole. He moved to South Korea to oversee development. According to Greene, this was the first time a Korean game studio had brought aboard

21648-568: The second quarter of 2018 over the same quarter in 2017, which they attributed to the popularity of the battle royale genre. In a 2022 study conducted on Japanese students who regularly play online games, battle royale gameplay was shown to have statistically significant correlations with gaming addiction and a sense of underachievement. The study also suggested that the battle royale genre requires more attention than other esports genres, particularly in terms of its link with aggressive feelings. First-person perspective A classic example of

21812-412: The second-most played game in the country by August 2017, only behind League of Legends , it subsequently surpassed League of Legends by October 2017. Battlegrounds ' popularity in China led to a large increase in users of Steam from there, with more than half of Steam clients having Chinese as their default language in late 2017. Several journalists commented on the game's rapid growth towards

21976-486: The size of the maps in PUBG has been one of the challenges with working with Unreal, which was not designed with such maps in mind. The game was designed as a mix between the realistic simulation of ARMA 3 and the arcade-like action focus and player accessibility of H1Z1 . To prevent in-game cheating , the game uses BattlEye anti-cheating software, which had permanently banned over 13 million players by October 2018. BattlEye indicated that 99% of all cheating software for

22140-465: The success of PUBG: Battlegrounds , include two NetEase titles, Rules of Survival which was discontinued on 2022 July and the mobile game Knives Out , and the mobile game Free Fire by Garena which has over 150 Million daily active players as of 2021. Each of these games has received hundreds of millions of downloads, mostly in Asia, by 2018. With the success of Battlegrounds and Fortnite ,

22304-417: The survival elements of battle royales, the love/belonging and esteem tiers are a result of the battle royale being necessarily a social and competitive game, and the final tier of self-actualization comes from becoming skilled in the game to win frequently. Business Insider projected that battle royale games would bring in over $ 2 billion during 2018 alone, and would generate a total of $ 20 billion by

22468-419: The survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game . Battle royale games involve dozens to hundreds of players, who start with minimal equipment and then must eliminate all other opponents while avoiding being trapped outside a shrinking "safe area", with the winner being the last player or team alive. The name for the genre is taken from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale , itself based on

22632-421: The system by selling them for monetary value through unofficial third-party platforms. While still in early access, Bluehole offered an early preview of the system by offering time-limited crates that could be purchased during the first PUBG Invitations tournament during Gamescom in August 2017, with the sales from these contributing to the prize pool. Among loot from these crates were special outfits inspired by

22796-403: The team as PUBG Studios. PUBG represents the standalone version of what Greene believes is the "final version" of the battle royale concept, incorporating the elements he had designed in previous iterations. Faster development was possible with the game engine Unreal Engine 4, compared with ARMA and H1Z1 , which were built with proprietary game engines. Greene acknowledged that implementing

22960-401: The title character and protagonist of the novel, tells his own story: "What memories and thoughts crowd into my mind, as, at the threshold of the afternoon of my wandering life, I sit down to write the story of its morning hours!" This device allows the audience to see the narrator's mind's eye view of the fictional universe , but it is limited to the narrator's experiences and awareness of

23124-419: The title more enjoyable to watch and play, leading to its popularity. Jeff Grubb of Venture Beat considered Battlegrounds a paradigm shift in the first-person shooter market similar to how Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare also changed the landscape of shooters when it was released in 2007, and believed it did this by being an anti- Call of Duty in terms of pacing and strategy. IGN's Chloi Rad has praised

23288-425: The titular character but is describing the story of the main characters, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold , where a young girl, having been killed, observes, from some post-mortem, extracorporeal viewpoint, her family's struggle to cope with her disappearance. Typically, however, the narrator restricts the events relayed in the narrative to those that could reasonably be known. In autobiographical fiction ,

23452-520: The top 10 highest grossing revenue games for the month and exceeding revenue from Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive . By May 2017, the game had sold over two million copies, with total gross revenues estimated at US$ 60 million . Within three months of its early access release, it had surpassed over five million copies sold, and Bluehole announced it had exceeded US$ 100 million in sale revenue. Battlegrounds reached this four million mark faster than Minecraft , which took over

23616-482: The true state of affairs. In some stories, first-person narrators may relay dialogue with other characters or refer to information they heard from the other characters, in order to try to deliver a larger point of view. Other stories may switch the narrator to different characters to introduce a broader perspective. An unreliable narrator is one that has completely lost credibility due to ignorance, poor insight, personal biases, mistakes, dishonesty, etc., which challenges

23780-579: The use of loot boxes to offer "pay-to-win" items in other games in November 2017, the PUBG Corporation affirmed that while they would continue to add new cosmetic items rewarded by in-game crate purchases, they would never add anything that affects or alters gameplay. In May 2018, PUBG Corporation disabled the ability to trade skins on the Steam Marketplace as they found that players were still abusing

23944-551: The values of socialism and is deemed harmful to young consumers", as translated by Bloomberg . Gaming publications in the west speculated that this would make it difficult or impossible to publish battle royale within the country. In November 2017, PUBG Corporation announced its partnership with Tencent to publish the game in China, making some changes in the game to "make sure they accord with socialist core values, Chinese traditional culture and moral rules" to satisfy Chinese regulations and censors. However, during mid-2018,

24108-550: Was a free version of PUBG that was meant to be better playable on low-end computers by having significant reductions in graphic details and other features, but is otherwise feature complete with the full game. The version was meant to be played in regions where the game's minimum specifications may be difficult for average players to achieve, with a beta launch first releasing in Thailand in January 2019, and in Europe that October. PUBG Lite

24272-411: Was again the top-selling PC paid game of 2018, increasing its annual sales revenue to $ 1.028 billion . In addition, the free-to-play PUBG Mobile became the first mobile battle royale game to gross over $ 1 billion , reaching over $ 1.5 billion as of 2019. Battle royale game A battle royale game is an online multiplayer video game genre that blends last-man-standing gameplay with

24436-511: Was also the need to establish a format for presenting a PUBG match to make it interesting to spectators, which he thought would take some time to develop given the nature of the emergent gameplay, comparing it to established first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arena esport games. A 20-team, 80-player tournament with a US$ 200,000 prize pool was organized by Intel in Oakland in November 2017. Krafton had looked to expand PUBG beyond

24600-449: Was attributed to its free-to-play business model and cross-platform support, as well as its accessibility to casual players . Battlegrounds creator Brendan Greene credited it with further growing the battle royale genre. Its mainstream publicity further increased following a stream by Tyler "Ninja" Blevins with Drake , JuJu Smith-Schuster and Travis Scott . which set a Twitch record for concurrent viewership. It accumulated

24764-417: Was created by Brendan Greene, known by his online alias " PlayerUnknown ", whose Battle Royale mod of DayZ first released in 2013. This mod was directly inspired by Battle Royale , and introduces concepts from the film such as a shrinking play zone that forces players into closer proximity as the game goes on. In contrast to Hunger Games -inspired mods, in Greene's mod weapons were randomly scattered around

24928-403: Was designed to include player versus player encounters, but generally these events were infrequent due to the size of the game's map and the persistence of the game world. This led to the development of game mods that sacrificed DayZ open-endedness in favor of focusing on more frequent hostile interactions between players to determine an eventual winner. The most influential battle royale mod

25092-453: Was developed by Tencent's TiMi Studio. Both versions are free-to-play , and were released for Android and iOS devices on February 9, 2018. The games had a combined total of 75 million pre-registrations, and ranked first and second on the Chinese iOS download charts at launch. Following a soft launch in Canada, an English version of Exhilarating Battlefield , localized simply as PUBG Mobile ,

25256-555: Was first released for Windows via Steam 's early access beta program in March 2017, with a full release in December 2017; the same month, Microsoft Studios studios released it for the Xbox One via the Xbox Game Preview program, with a full release coming in September 2018. Afterwards the game was ported to the PlayStation 4 , Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles, and the Stadia streaming platform, and has also spawned

25420-566: Was free for Stadia's paid subscribers on launch. Following the Chinese publication deal for the Windows version, Tencent Games and PUBG Corporation additionally announced that they were planning on releasing two mobile versions based on the game in the country. The first, PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield , is an abridged version of the original game, and was developed by LightSpeed & Quantum Studio, an internal division of Tencent Games . The second, PUBG: Army Attack , includes more arcade-style elements, including action taking place on warships, and

25584-453: Was highly replayable. The game was credited with popularizing the battle royale genre, with a number of unofficial Chinese clones also being produced following its success. The game received several Game of the Year nominations and set seven Guinness World Records , among many other accolades. PUBG Corporation has run several small tournaments and introduced in-game tools to help with broadcasting

25748-418: Was officially announced in November, and was released on December 7, 2018. PUBG Corporation studio head Brian Corrigan said that while they had a small team working on the PlayStation 4 port for some time, it was only until the Xbox One port was mostly completed that they began fully working on the PlayStation port. The PlayStation 4 version of the game includes platform-exclusive customization items, specifically

25912-450: Was part of Microsoft 's press conference during E3 2017 to announce that PUBG would be coming to Xbox One as a timed console exclusive sometime by the end of 2017, using the Xbox Game Preview early access approach to test it. Initially, Greene said that Microsoft was not directly involved in the porting but only providing assistance to make sure the port is good, and that most of the porting responsibilities are being done by Anticto,

26076-484: Was released worldwide on March 19, 2018. Following its release, a Korean and Japanese oriented version of the game released in June 2018, under the title name PUBG Mobile KR . A Vietnamese version, PUBG Mobile VN released in January 2019. In China, PUBG Mobile had been awaiting approval by the government for an authorized release, during which the game could only be offered as a public test. However, Tencent's planned release

26240-479: Was renamed PUBG Corporation with Kim as its chief executive officer . PUBG Corporation continued the development of the game and its marketing and growth, opening an office in the United States with plans for future ones in Europe and Japan. In August 2018, PUBG Corporation launched the "Fix PUBG" campaign, acknowledging that the game by then still had several lingering bugs and other performance issues. The campaign finished in November, with PUBG Corporation calling it

26404-511: Was shut down on April 29, 2021. On January 12, 2022, the game became free to play . A new account tier, called Battleground Plus, was made available for purchase that includes additional customization items and in-game experience boosts. Owners of the game who purchased prior to January 12 were automatically upgraded to Battleground Plus for free. Battleground Plus allows for playing in ranked mode and on custom servers and includes additional customization items and in-game experience boosts. Greene

26568-475: Was suspended due to the government approval freeze across most of 2018 . By May 2019, Tencent announced it would no longer seek to publish PUBG Mobile in China, but instead would re-release the game under the title Game for Peace that readily meets China's content restrictions, such as eliminating blood and gore. Taiwanese version of the game was released following the Chinese version, as PUBG Mobile TW . A version meant for lower-end mobile devices which features

26732-450: Was the year's only new successful battle royale game. In contrast to other multiplayer-only games, the large number of players typically involved in battle royale games generally require a large enough concurrent player base for matchmaking in a reasonable amount of time. The Culling , by Xaviant Studios, was released in early access in 2016, and was designed to be a streaming-friendly battle royale mode for 16 players. However, following

26896-516: Was to optimize the right distribution and placement of weapons and gear across the map, to encourage players to make strategic decisions about how to proceed in the game without overly penalizing players who may not find weapons within the first few minutes of a round. During early access, additional maps were planned, such as one set on a fictional island in the Adriatic Sea that included snow-covered Yugoslavian territories. Greene stated that he thought

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