PUBG: Battlegrounds

PUBG is a player versus player-based 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 the match.

Each match starts with players parachuting from a plane onto one of the eight maps which have different sizes and terrain ranging from 1 to 64 square kilometers. 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.

The game's concept and design was led by Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, who had previously created a mod for ARMA 2 called DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the 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 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 as it is 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 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 streamers on Twitch and YouTube 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 a central location, but he moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and 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.

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 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 the platform for years, in August 2017.

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 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.