PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds represents a paradigm shift in the shooter genre. Its thrilling last-man-standing multiplayer action has led to more than 4 million in sales, but it’s the breadth of its appeal that makes it so important to the future of gaming.
Everyone is playing Battlegrounds. That’s hyperbole, but it doesn’t feel too far from the truth. The online shooter from developer Bluehole has attracted a huge player base, and it’s not slowing down.
“Unlike other games, we’re maintaining a very constant rate of sales,” Bluehole global business director Woonghee Cho told GamesBeat. “In regions like Asia, especially China, we’re seeing very rapid growth.”
Everyone is playing Battlegrounds in the same way that, at one point in time, “everyone” was playing Halo, Quake, or GoldenEye. Battlegrounds is the latest entry in a long lineage of competitive shooters that bring in an audience with diverse tastes. And like Halo, Quake, or GoldenEye, it is going to redefine what players expect from the genre while replacing its predecessor as the king of the genre.
Image Credit: Microsoft
What Battlegrounds reminds me of the most is the summer of 2007. During the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in Los Angeles that year, something weird started to happen: people who didn’t care about shooters at websites like GameSpot, in major magazines like EGM, and on podcasts like 1UP Yours couldn’t stop talking about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
That military shooter from developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision caught people’s attention due to its advanced animations, its slick controls, and its anti-Halo boots-on-the-ground combat.To hype up demand, Activision rolled out a testing phase for Call of Duty 4 where you could play its online…
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