PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has seen a lot of ups and downs in its development over the past year. Now that the game is mostly stable, outside of a few lingering issues on PC, the plan is to help bring PUBG esports to the next level.
Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene talked about the game’s future in a recent interview with Eurogamer, saying that the team is currently “heavily investing into setting up an esports infrastructure.”
“We’re building an esports team globally now, between the U.S. and Europe and Asia, and really trying to develop out the tools we need to support esport organizations and players in order to give a good foundation,” Greene said.
The plan doesn’t stop there either, Greene is even looking three years ahead to the future of PUBG as an esport.
“I want to see it as a considered esport with events taking place in big stadiums and sort of year-long leagues, that’s what my dream for battle royale has been, that’s where I want to see us go, and looking at what we’re doing this year I really see that as a great chance.”
Greene said that, although he travels a lot and doesn’t get to spend a lot of time with the PUBG Corp. team in Korea, he still oversees a lot of what’s being done behind the scenes. The team’s vision for PUBG is to keep it ever-growing and ever-changing.
“We want to build this game as a service,” Greene said to Eurogamer. “We want to build this as a platform for game modes, for not only battle royale but for other game modes that we ever put in the Event servers or that the community come up with via Custom games. We want to bring our Custom games to even more people this year and really start to polish off that system. So for us it’s about creating a platform, and creating a kind of stable base for a possible esport or just as a platform for many different types of game modes.”
In its short time as an esport, PUBG has seen some minor improvements. But the spectator tools and back-end systems that help tournament organizers turn it into a great show are not quite there yet. Thankfully, it seems like Greene and PUBG Corp. realize this, and these kind of improvements are next on the list.
Greene was also asked about PUBG’s competition in the battle royale genre, mainly from Fortnite, and how some said that PUBG was copying Fortnite with its new in-game emote system.
“It was funny, when we released the Emotes people were saying “oh you’re copying Fortnite“—well, no,” said Greene. “We recorded these Emotes in Prague last year, before Fortnite [Battle Royale] was even announced.
“We had an intention to put a means of non-verbal communication into the game because we really believe you know that there are some people with mics, some people without mics, so having a way for them to communicate with their squad members is essential, and it’s essential for a tactical gameplay. So we have these plans that have existed for the last year.”
Published: Apr 16, 2018 11:00 am