PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has achieved the milestone of selling 4 million copies. The game was launched in late March and took less than 3 months to hit the milestone.
Creator Brendan Greene aka PlayerUnknown thanked fans on Twitter for their support. The game had earlier taken just 16 days to sell 1m copies, and less than a month to hit 2m copies. The 3M mark was reached in early June.
PUBG is a multiplayer online survival game developed by Bluehole for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One. Despite being an online survival first person shooter game similar to Battle Royale, Battlegrounds received a great response from users, and became highly popular in very less time. Now, it is only behind Valve’s Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in terms of popularity.
PUBG is based on battle royal-style game mods that were previously developed by Brendan Greene for other games. However, Greene then expanded these mods into one standalone game. In PUGB, players are dropped in an 8×8 kilometre island, and they have to search for resources to defeat opponents. Players can search buildings and other sites to search vehicles, weapons, clothing, armor, etc. Better equipment are distributed at certain high-risk zones. The available safe area decreases in size over a match, forcing encounters among surviving players. Players that get killed can be looted to acquire their gear. A plane—at random, flies over different parts of map and drop a loot package. The last surviving player wins the round.
Developer Bluehole keeps on releasing patches and updates to maintain the popularity of the game. Bluehole also has plans for console releases following the full release of the Windows version. Xbox One version is planned by the end of 2017.
“We couldn’t have reached this milestone without the dedication of our players and we are truly humbled by their passionate response,” creator Brendan Greene had said after the sale of 1 million copies.
“As we move to make improvements and deliver new content we will actively engage this growing fan base.”
Greene had previously stated that he was interested in creating a standalone game based on the mod he created for the ARMA series, and working with Bluehole gives him “the resources and creative freedom to build the experience I’ve always envisioned.”
