PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Development Spun Off To Its Own PUBG Corp. Entity
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a smash hit by any measurement and is doing incredibly well considering it's only available on Steam for PC right now. It is, however, the number one most played game on Steam currently and that's pretty huge considering some of the eSports mega-titles hosted on the platform. The game was developed by Bluehole Inc. and the team within that company who worked on the game is now being spun off into its own company. That new company will be called the PUBG Corporation.
Reports indicate that the CEO of the PUBG Corporation will be Chang-han Kim. If you are wondering why exactly the team behind PUBG was spun off, it's because Bluehole wants them to be able to be able to react to the game market with more flexibility. Gamers hope that really means it will be so they can spend all their time and effort making PUBG better and working on console versions of the game.
PUBG Corp. is moving quickly and has already established an office here in the U.S. and branches are planned for Japan and Europe. PUBG has been quite the phenomenon rapidly growing into the most played game on Steam. PUBG passed Valve's own DOTA 2 for the highest number of concurrent players for the first time in late August when it racked up 877,844 concurrent gamers.
About a month after setting that concurrent player record, PUBG again crushed the concurrent player record racking up over 1.5 million players. One thing that certainly helped PUBG to grow so fast was the highly anticipated first person server update to the game. That first person view was praised for being game-changing and removed some of the player's ability to see exactly what was around corners. The end result is a game that is more challenging to play than it was before and more realistic.
That update also brought in new weapons and some fixes for bugs and exploits. Notably the update eliminated the ability for players to frag a knocked out teammate to prevent the opposing team from getting the kill. PUBG was also recently in the limelight when its developers took issue with Epic Games for its title Fortnight Battle Royale mode that was inspired by PUBG.
"We've had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG’s development as they are the creators of Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), the engine we licensed for the game," Bluehole VP and executive producer Chang Han Kim stated in a press release. "After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known."
