Most fans just call it PUBG, with differing levels of capitalization. “It's all caps because it looks better as all caps,” Greene said. The official name is actually PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, but few publications use the caps. So calling it Player u nknown's Battlegrounds because it was Player u nknown's Battle Royale before that.” “It's only called PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds because ‘Battlegrounds’ you can't get a copyright on,” Greene told Business Insider.

That idea served as the basic structure for PUBG’s standalone release.īut you can’t name a game after a movie without paying someone to use the copyrighted phrase, and the word “battlegrounds” is also a copyright nightmare.

The Battle Royale mode, named for the Japanese movie the Hunger Games is often accused of ripping off, pits a bunch of players against each other to be the last person left alive. He’s built up a following under that name creating the “Battle Royale” game mod for Arm a 3 and then consulting on H1Z1 to create official Battle Royale-inspired modes. That’s hard to pull off.īrendan Greene is the game’s creative director, and he goes by “Playerunknown” online. We agree it’s a silly name, somehow managing to combine something very specific with the very general in the most boring way possible, while also not providing a good acronym. Why is it called Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)? So the short answer is that everyone is buying it or at least watching it, which leads to people talking about it. It’s often in the top five most popular games on Twitch. It’s also a hit among streamers and YouTube personalities, due to both its general popularity and its ability to reliably serve up interesting moments in each round. SteamSpy estimates 6.5 million players have purchased the $29.99 game from Steam, and it has been reliably camped out in the top 10 best-sellers for Steam since its launch in March 2017. Why is everyone talking about Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)?īecause it’s a very popular game. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is a strange and idiosyncratic game, but it’s not an overnight success and there’s a reason it blew up in the way it has. That’s a short explanation of what the game is, but if you’ve been curious about why it’s so popular or confused by some aspects of this phenomena, this is a great place to start. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is an online, multiplayer survival game on the PC where you and up to 98 of your closest friends - and probably at least one Twitch streamer - skydives onto an island where you look for weapons and equipment that is then used to kill everyone else.

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