What's your take on the PUBG phenomenon and the Battle Royale genre?

I was a teenager when I was playing those games. Not enough brain cells for plans beyond the next 15 seconds.

 

And to clarify, outside of the hero in the movie. That sort of shooting won't work for bad guys.

 

Actually, at close range in PUBG (and especially in the early phase of the game), the SMG are pretty good. The Uzi, Vector, and UMP are generally much better at close range than the assault rifles. The only exception might be the M4 and only if it is fully kitted out, including vert grip, extended mag, and recoil comp. That is the only assault rifle that can go toe to toe with the SMG in PUBG at close range.

 

One thing worth discussing from a game design point of view is why PUBG is so popular despite having an extremely brutal initial learning curve. Nearly everybody hates PUBG during the first couple hours of gameplay and then a lot of people end up absolutely loving it after at least ten hours of gameplay. Clearly some people give up on PUBG during Steam's two hour refund period, yet it still managed to amass a huge playerbase. What about PUBG convinces people to stick with it and encourage their friends to join the fun?

In my case, I stuck with it only because I was trying to understand why the game had suddenly gotten so popular. I love FPS style games and have played a lot of hours of FPS games going all the way back to old school games like the original Doom and Wolfenstein games. I usually enjoy FPS games immediately. By contrast, it took me about ten hours before I started to enjoy PUBG. If I was not genuinely curious as a fellow game dev, I would not have keep playing PUBG long enough to start enjoying it. So I am left wondering how PUBG got over that with so many people. There are literally over 3 million simultaneous players at any time throughout the day.

I am currently at nearly 200 hours in PUBG, and I love the game. I am still very curious about how PUBG got so many players to keep playing during the initial brutal period. Is it merely the network effect caused by friends playing it? Or is it because so many popular streamers and YouTubers constantly play it?

 

This. I've heard before that once a city reaches a certain population threshold, it will inevitably continue to grow.

I'd bet that with video game or any media really, once a certain threshold of viewership or interest by whatever metric is reached, the thing will continue to grow until something else replaces it or it reaches its limit.

What really interest me is games like Counter-Strike though that will never die.

 

The Darwin Project more of the Hunger Games E-Sports take on the BR genre. It sounds like it will be limited to primitive weapons axes, bows, etc but with high tech drops for stealth/healing/tools/shields.

And one player who is the arena director and chooses which zones are safe/unsafe.

 

I actaully really like the concept of PUBG
Too bad its ugly as all hell.
No decent clothes
Graphics are...ok (Not bad, not great...just ok)...Iv seen worse *cough-coughCounterStrike*
Iv actually be dying for this to happen...
That's the reason Local Coop was so popular back in the day simply because it was a Battle Royale type game...
The only reason this stuff hadn't happened sooner was because big studios didn't think it would sell. Now youv got PUBG and Fortnite (No fun, but at least that ones nice to look at) out selling morons Like EA's Starwar's MP only games

I would actually like PUB more I think if they reduced the players per map and decreased the rate the circle shrank.
It would make it way more cat and mouse.
so my enhacments for it woulr be:
Players 50
Circle 45 minutes to maximum shrinkage
and for the love of god, Fix the bloody character graphics...its so ugly....