When you think of PUBG in 2024,
what do you think of?

My guess is probably either one of the countless memes,
or perhaps the massive success the game has found on
mobile.

What some of you might have forgotten,
is that long before PUBG ever graced half a billion
android phones with its presence,
and long before it was on consoles,
it was a PC only game.

Originally, PUBG was released as an early access game
on Steam,
and right off the bat it was a monumental success.
It was basically H1Z1 but good.

After coming out of closed beta and into early
access on Steam, meaning anyone could play it,
the game skyrocketed in popularity
over the following months.
by november 2017, the game managed to average
over a million concurrent players,
and by January of 2018, reached a
Steam record of 3.2 million concurrent players,
which still hasn't been beaten to this day.

PUBG was on top of the world in under 12 months,
and was looking bulletproof.
But a couple of unforseen events, and one huge
corporate cock up completely reversed the game's good fortune.
Just as quickly as it picked up steam,
it lost it.
In the following 12 months,
PUBG's average player count fell by over a million,
and the player count continued to steadily decline long after
that.

But what exactly caused such a drastic fall off for such a promising game,
and how did PUBG reinvent itself to become even bigger?

Firstly, let's address the elephant in the room,
Fortnite battle royale.

They had the same formula as PUBG, but
it was destined to be more popular.
It was free, cross platform from day one, more visually appealing,
had building as a unique element, and was just more suited
to a casual audience.

To sum it up, Fortnite was PUBG
but more colourful, fast paced, and most importantly free.
Once fortnite had established a foothold
in the battle royale genre,
it almost immediately
made PUBG's offering less pallateable,
especially given PUBG's $30 price at the time.

I remember actually playing PUBG before moving to fortnite
around this time, along with countless others.

Even if you were fairly decent at FPS games
PUBG often felt unrewarding,
and the game began incentivising people to bush camp
and hide until the final circle.
I remember a majority of the times I would lose
in the top 25, were situations where I couldn't even
see the enemy, which was much less of a problem in fortnite,
although the same problem did still persist to an extent.
PUBG became frustrating, and increasingly so as more and more
casual players left the game, to play Fortnite instead.