Even though it’s still to launch on Xbox One, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has already sold over 8 million copies. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene announced the figure at Microsoft’s Gamescom briefing. Today also sees the game receive Nvidia Shadowplay Highlights support. 

Battlegrounds launched on Steam Early Access in March. After only four months, it already boasted over 5 million players, and a couple of weeks ago it hit a whopping 500,000 concurrent players. It’s got the concurrent player record for any non-Valve game on Steam. 

An update today adds Shadowplay Highlights support, so you can capture and share clips of your misadventures. Show off your chicken dinners, car chases and that time you ran naked through a red zone just for the hell of it. 

If you’re one of the millions of chicken dinner hunters who play Battlegrounds, we want your craziest, best stories. Tell us all about your best and worst moments. 

Last weekend we asked for you to share your craziest stories from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Surprisingly, few of the best stories had anything to do with people winning. Instead the comments section quickly filled with hilarious tales of strategies gone wrong, absurd shenanigans gone right, and the overall kind of insanity that we'd expect from our readers. And if you missed the opportunity to share your story last week, feel free to add yours to the comments below.

Enjoy our selection of your best stories from Battlegrounds.

Naked Snake 

I have a pretty tough time getting second place in Battlegrounds fully equipped, so the fact that an entire squad somehow managed to pull it off completely naked is very upsetting to me. But Anthony comes with video evidence to support his wild story and it's definitely worth a watch—especially the final few minutes.

Commenter: Anthony Lake

So me and my mates were bored so we made up this amazing challenge.

No guns. No armour. No clothes. And we came second.

Check it out on our YouTube:

Jumping on a grenade 

Battlegrounds leaves little room for friendship unless you're playing with a squad. It's directly against the rules to ally with players while solo queuing. But Charlie Parson's story about the kindness of one stranger is just too cute. It's a 'fate will bring us together' type romance like Sleepless in Seattle or Serendipity, but with guns.

Commenter: Charlie Parsons

I started playing PUBG about the second week after it was released. In one of my early games I was playing solo, and I never realised that you could toggle your in-game microphone back then, so I played this game while talking out loud to myself. About halfway through the game I came to the four houses along the road leading to Saverny. As soon as I got close to the houses I was under heavy gunfire. 

From the sudden scare, I ran into a house and was in a standoff between me and another player who also had his game chat toggled on. After releasing all our ammunition onto each other, I called out and asked if we can stop killing each other and meet each other at the end of the game to see who wins if we still get to the finish. Remarkably I was able to get down to the last two players alive out of all 100 players who desperately tried to win. And funny enough, it really was me and the player I ran into before. We were the only ones left laying down in a field of wheat hiding from each other. 

Not knowing we had run into each other again, I spoke out and said "If you're the enemy from earlier, stand up." And so he did. He stood up and said, "Eh, you can win, I'm good for second place." After saying that I was ready to blow him away with my Scar-L but before I could he grabbed his last grenade and threw it below his own feet, and blew himself up, giving me my first ever Chicken dinner and a bounty of 1000 points. This was my first-ever win and it was one of the very rare experiences I've had in a game to come across another player who is as kind and not cold-hearted as I am. If I ever play a game with him again I will surely return the favor. I hope he sees this message, thank you.

Here comes the cavalry 

I never play in a squad with strangers because I'd rather not risk them being terrible, but this story restores my faith. Just when you think it's all over, a stranger can come flying out of nowhere and save your life.

Commenter: CitricBloodBath

Me and a random were playing duos, and we were down to about eight people left. We were in a house hiding out and waiting for the circle move to what ended up being the last circle of the game. We luckily had good rifles and I had a 4x scope. We popped off at least two just from shooting out the window. We were getting pretty excited about being this close to the end of the game, and I guess we both lost a little focus. The blue circle was fairly close behind the house, we didn't realize it was beginning to move. It was basically right on top of us when I noticed, and I was able to jump off the second story and run. 

My teammate, however, decided to take the long way down the stairs. I really don't know how he survived through the death wall, but I got to the white circle and instantly noticed two guys proning near a tree. I glanced at the player number. FOUR. It was just us! I take aim and, stupid me, emptied an entire clip into one of them with an UMP and a 2x scope. He went down, but his friend quickly hid behind the tree. I started to reload, but there was no cover. "Well, I'm dead." The opponent stepped out from behind the tree as I hear the explosion from a buggy being boosted. The opponent takes a couple shots at me but starts shooting over my shoulder. I prone and look behind me for my teammate. 

My squadmate had gotten a vehicle from near the house and flew by me, boosting the whole way and laughing maniacally. He hit a rock and half side flipped right onto the guy, crushing him with the side of the buggy. Up pops the Chicken Dinner. It was my first win in duo, and his first win at all, and we starting cheering and I'm pretty sure he was tearing up. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could have almost sworn I heard patriotic music playing in the background. We didn't add each other, and I haven't seen him again. One day, JavatheButt, we will meet again.

Do a barrel roll 

Much has been said about Battlegrounds' hilariously awful car physics. But, man, these videos never cease to make me laugh.

Commenter: Kilborn

Driving in this game has some problems, I have no idea how to describe this but things go bad very quickly for us.

Winner, winner, potato dinner 

Someone get this guy a medal.

Commenter: KadooblerEnchilada

I won a duo game with a mate playing on a Macbook Pro with around 10fps. He even got the winning kill, top that!

Beep, beep, I'm a jeep

A car horn can communicate a lot of things like, "Hey, watch where you're going" or "Hold still while I mercilessly murder this person for you." This story has a little bit of both.

Commenter: Ryan Harvey

I was playing solo and driving a jeep to my next looting spot. Suddenly another driver, also in a jeep pulled in front of me on the road. I rammed his car, preparing for a fight. Instead of hopping out, the player stopped their car for a moment and honked. I honked back. He started driving and I followed, honking back and forth. After driving for some time, we went our separate ways. I was driving near a field some time later when I suddenly came under fire. I jumped from the car to shoot back but was hit badly in the process. Suddenly I hear a vehicle pulling up near me. It's the jeep guy. Despite having a clear and unobstructed view of me, he accelerates and barrels across the field, crushing my assailant and honking his horn the whole time. I jump back in my jeep and drive to him as he loots the body. We look at each other for a moment, I give him a honk of thanks, and we part ways for good. I don't know what became of him in the end but it was nice to see some humanity out on the battlegrounds.

Beep, beep, grenade in the jeep 

But not every story about jeeps is wholesome.

Commenter: Legios

A story about a squad game.

About an epic car chase, how our jeep got stolen with two squad members inside and the glorious sacrifice of a team member.

It's a touching story about love, teamwork, hardship, and tons of laughs.

Dr. Disrespect 

We've all had a bad game or two in our lifetime. You know, the kind of match where you screw up and feel your face flush with shame. Well, if I was the victim in Randy's story, I'd probably be a few weeks before I mustered up the courage to play again.

Commenter: Randy

Today, I'm here to regale you with a tale of utmost disrespect. Imagine, for a second, your average Mylta Power plane route. If you put in the pumps, you can make it to the radio tower on the hill of the island. I land, I looted, and I found nothing more potent than a new set of gloves. Determined to make something out of the run, I decided to run west down the hill towards gunshots. I see this man, armed with a scar and a pump shotgun, and decide it's time for some sick strats.

This man had no aim. And I mean that, no aim. He must have been new, and the Arma-style controls didn't click with him. Every shot he took missed and he didn't seem to know he could swap to full auto. I take advantage of that and zig-zag to the nearest building, but alas, no guns. Only a backpack. Not entirely clueless, the man had ascended a nearby guard tower, and I sat and watched him from behind a wall. Eventually, he descends, and I wait for him to head towards me and, immediately, the disrespect begins. He has his pump out, trying to hit me as I circle him. Finally, five shots are down, and he starts walking away from me while reloading. I take the opportunity to run at him full force and superman punch the poor man's skull. Blood on my hands and the biggest grin on my face, I take the loot he didn't deserve to have. Then I subsequently get shot trying to cross the bridge near Mylta. There is no doubt in my mind that if that was this guy's first round, he immediately uninstalled and refunded the game.

These were just a few of the great stories our commenters told us. For the rest, be sure to check out the comment thread from last week.

Only one in 6,000 people win their first game of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. That means, of the 7 million copies sold, only around 1,166 people were so skilled (or lucky) to have been the last person standing after their first game. I'm going to make the bold assumption that they all read our guide before playing. Considering I still have friends that, after hundreds of hours, still haven't won their chicken dinner, that's impressive. What's even crazier is that your odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are twice that. 

These fun facts come from a recent video over at IGN, detailing some statistics about what is quickly becoming the most popular game of 2017. For example, players have already racked up 25,816 years and counting of collective game time. I'm a little surprised by the fact that of the 965.83 million deaths tallied since Battlegrounds launched, only 9.73 million—1 percent—were committed by the red and blue zones. It seems that most players are pretty damn good at avoiding them—or at least getting gunned down in an attempt to run away. In fact, you're twice as likely to get punched to death than killed by the deadly blue zone.

The video contains a whole bunch of other stats, some interesting and some predictable. For example, it's not surprising that assault rifles account for 56.97 percent of all gun-related deaths. Of those, the AKM is clearly the popular choice, though I've personally come to favor the M16.

If you want to find out more, you can watch the video above.

Note: The statistic about your odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime appears to be out of date. The current odds are 1/13,500. But don't think you're safe. Lightning will get you eventually.

Seeing re-releases of Final Fantasy games like IX and X/X-2 on PC makes me happy, and it's not just because they're great RPGs. The secret, real reason is that Square Enix added optional fast-forward functions to both of these games, allowing me to knock through their many random battles in seconds, rather than minutes. That shows a lot of respect for the player's time, and inarguably improves the game for me. Well done, Square Enix. Now I want to play everything at four times the speed. 

The only trouble is, it's made me think, in detail, about the games that don't use my time so well. When I'm driving from one side of the map to the other for a mission in GTA Online for the hundredth time, with no fast travel option, I feel like I should be doing something more worthwhile, like reading Great Expectations or learning the German language. That's not to mention the three-or-so minute wait between the game launching and putting me in a server every time it starts. I love GTA Online, but I have to work for it. 

Time is more important than money in PC gaming: it's never been cheaper or easier to accumulate the games you want to play, but the hours you invest have to feel like they're worth it. 

End of the grind?

"I think the developer of any kind of game needs to be respectful of a player’s time, and if you make long-form games you have a lot more time that needs to be treated preciously," says Matt MacLean, lead narrative designer on Obsidian's Tyranny. I ask MacLean whether he believes mandatory grinding has gone out of fashion in RPGs specifically. "I think as more games grow up and away from the D&D model of knocking down doors to kill monsters to knock down bigger doors to kill bigger monsters there will be less and less emphasis on ‘grinding’ monsters and more emphasis on rewarding the player for completing quests, collecting things, exploring areas.

"Seen from a very abstract level, I think very old RPG games failed in that, if you were not winning at a particular battle, your only recourse was to play bully and tackle older/easier encounters until you level up and are ready to tackle the previous impossible obstacle." 

MacLean also worked on South Park: The Stick of Truth. The combat in this undemanding RPG was pretty simple, with the emphasis instead on enjoying the jokes and exploring an authentic version of the show's town. "The target audience factors into most every decision we make on a game—we have to be very familiar with what concepts players will already know coming into a game. On a game like South Park, our intended audience was ‘the South Park fan’ and while we could safely assume a lot of South Park fans are RPG gamers, the game has to be aimed at the entire venn diagram, not just the overlap that’s easiest to entertain. 

"South Park’s length is more a function of the story and humour than the demands of the audience, but certainly the game’s relatively modest difficulty was driven in part by [us being] conscious that it’s better to err on the hardcore gamers calling Stick of Truth too easy than to have a massive swaths of fans stop laughing because they’re dying over and over again."

Pillars of Eternity was made for a different crowd, one deeply familiar with the Infinity Engine era of RPGs from the late '90s and early '00s. It's fair to assume the player will be more patient when it comes to customisation, absorbing lore and strategic combat. "Whereas South Park had character creation simplified down to one choice (pick your class), Pillars opened with nearly a dozen classes, a bevy of races, attributes and skills to customise—this deluge of options was both acceptable for the target audience of Pillars and, based on Kickstarter input, many of them craved this level of detailed character customisation and would likely have found too much simplicity to be a bad thing."

Instead of thinking about hours invested, they considered the different ways you might spend that time. "Some players will read every line of text, examine every object, and take full advantage of a real-time-with-pause system to ponder their options, others skip every bit of reading allowable and with most folks resting somewhere between those extremes, estimating where the player will be after X number of hours only gets you so far," MacLean says. 

"Taken as a whole, it’s largely meaningless for us to think in terms of ‘hours in’ and most pacing is established by character level, quest completion, or some combination of the two."

Back to the start

Roguelikes, or games with roguelike elements, are repetitive by design. I love FTL, even though I've tackled the same intergalactic moral conundrums a bunch of times and memorised all the various ways they play out. With such light touch writing, though, I can blitz through them and focus on gathering a large crew and decent ship upgrades for the game's final battle. 

Presenting the same chunks of story over and over again can still be a test of the player's patience. In the roguelike narrative game Sunless Sea, permadeath meant repeating chunks of text-heavy scenarios. Alexis Kennedy, the game's creative director, is frank about that. "I think having long negative spaces between events in Sunless Sea made the game, but one thing I regret most, by a long way, is making players repeat content after permadeath. That was just me trying to make two different kinds of games at the same time. It’s not a mistake that I hope I’ll make again." It's something that Failbetter's promising-looking space-based follow-up, Sunless Skies, is looking to avoid. It's even mentioned in the game's Kickstarter pitch video. 

"FTL was one of my influences on Sunless Sea, but we didn’t do a lot of the things FTL did well. You might play five games, or you might settle down and have a dramatic game that lasts all evening. Cultist Simulator is something much more lightweight: something that you could play over evenings and evenings and get hundreds of hours of play out of it, but you can finish the game in the evening." 

Cultist Simulator is a narrative board game, the prototype of which you can download now. To avoid repetition, Kennedy is looking at including a legacy system similar to Sunless Sea, only with a few additions—that is, you play as a successive character each time, so there's a sense of continuity between playthroughs, but more random elements shape your protagonist so the game feels different from the start. 

Stop wasting my time!

I'm convinced that some of the success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is down to the way it respects your time as a player. Games last around 20 or 30 minutes and the matchmaking is quick, making it the most concentrated and gratifying form of battle royale around. "I was actually thinking about that as well when I was making Cultist Simulator," Kennedy says. "The games are almost in no sense alike and they’re at the opposite ends of the market, but you know what you’re getting into. It’s not just that it’s something that takes up a short period of time—a lot of games are short and not interesting—it’s that at least I know how much time I’m going to have to invest in it." 

Any design decision that cuts out wasted time is a welcome one, no matter how granular a change that might seem. I was fascinated by the success of the Stop Wasting My Time mod for XCOM 2, which currently has over 240,000 subscribers on Steam Workshop and over 70,000 downloads on Nexus. Despite this unquestionably being one of the best strategy games of the last few years, the mod's popularity suggests many players were more than happy to cut out the pauses that occur between kills, going into cover and so on. 

"When the game was released, my very first mod was a simple config edit that increased soldiers' movement speed," says the mod's creator, Danny 'BlueRaja' Pflughoeft. "I liked that it saved time, but I quickly grew to hate how unnatural it made the animations. I realised what I really wanted was to reduce the lengthy pauses between actions, which would require more than a simple config edit. Thus, 'Stop Wasting My Time' was born." 

Pflughoeft wanted to preserve the natural pace of Firaxis's game, while still removing those little time-wasters that players found annoying. "In XCOM 2, most of the pauses are definitely deliberate. They're also important—if you play the game with no pauses at all, the game feels rushed and unfun. With 'Stop Wasting My Time', I tried very hard to strike the appropriate balance between 'time-wasting' and 'too rushed.' If I did it correctly, you shouldn't even notice the mod is enabled!"

I ask Pflughoeft if developers are conscious enough of players' time generally. "Definitely. In fact, the little pauses and time-wasters are a crucial element in many games to making rewards feel rewarding. Would Minecraft be as fun if every block broke instantly? Would Clash of Clans be as addictive if you didn't have to wait for things to build? Waiting can be so gratifying that games like Cookie Clicker spawned an entire genre of 'Idle Games', where waiting is the entire game!"

Not everything should be instantly satisfying. Games like Dark Souls are built on the idea of delayed gratification, which is backed up by world-class combat and environmental design. And developers are more conscious of how they use your time than ever, I think, because they have to be. That's apparent in better pacing at the start of modern blockbusters, shorter forms of games and more generous use of checkpoints—they know the fight is on for your time, not just your money. 

"I do think that every game dev who’s responsible for checkpoints should be forced to spend a year raising a child," Kennedy says. "Sometimes you don’t have any option but to put the controller down. I think there are strong reasons to prevent someone from pausing or saving, but those reasons are sometimes overwritten because the real world has children, fires and grocery deliveries."

Additional interview quotes supplied by Joe Donnelly.