Demetrious Johnson, widely considered to be the best pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world, reckons he could beat MMA icon Conor McGregor at PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. When he stars in Uproar's competitive PUBG tournament 'The Golden Chicken' next week, Johnson thinks he'll come out on top there too. 

Alongside a host of popular YouTube talent, Johnson hopes to head home with a "10k Solid Gold Chicken" in tow, in what will be the athlete's second professional tourney. 

"Oh, I'm very excited," Johnson tells me. "This is my second competition and this is one of my favourite games. I'm looking forward to it and I'm looking forward to go out there and kill everybody in the woods. Nobody can beat the shadow, the Warrior in the Woods."  

This type of bravado is synonymous with the professional fighting world. But while Johnson has more than proven himself in The Octagon, he's relatively green when it comes to pro gaming. As the number one pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world at present, I ask him if he reckons he's got what it takes to become the top chicken dinner winner of all time.  

"Oh I don't know, that's a long shot. You've got some really great, really talented guys out there at the moment," he says. "You've got guys who're playing these games professionally, eight hours a day. Videogames for me are a release, I wish I could put that amount of time into it but I don't know if I could ever be better than them. 

"What I will say is this: There's not another athlete out there that puts as many hours into the gym, and as many hours into videogames that's as good as me." 

Uproar's The Golden Chicken PUBG tournament kicks off at 2pm PST/10pm BST on October 14. Look out for our full interview with Demetrious Johnson later this week. 

Despite high profile forays into other disciplines, Conor McGregor is not the highest ranked pound-for-pound UFC fighter in the world. That accolade belongs to Demetrious Johnson—the sport's long-serving, record-holding Flyweight champion who hosts Twitch livestreams in his spare time.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is his favourite game at the moment, Johnson tells me, and it's one he reckons he could outperform company counterpart Conor McGregor at.

"I fucking better be able to," says Johnson of his chances of beating The Notorious on Erangel. "I'd like to think I can, yeah, absolutely."  

Later this month, Johnson will take part in Uproar's The Golden Chicken tournament against a host of YouTube personalities and PUBG pros. The flyweight's Twitch channel blurb notes that whenever he hangs up his gloves he'd love to pursue a career in professional streaming. With this in mind, I ask Johnson if there is any overlap between his MMA career and his latest hobby.    

"I've never done a livestream of me fighting in the UFC or training or anything like that but I have livestreamed before going over to the arena to fight," he says. "But at UFC 197, I believe it was, I went to fight Henry Cejudo, and I was streaming Dark Souls 3. I said I'd be right back as I had to go fight, I fought, won, then came back and jumped right back on the stream. I've done that a few times before."  

Having successfully defended his Flyweight title on ten occasions, Johnson is widely considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the business. Yet the thought of Dark Souls speedrunning is to him more challenging than TKOs and armbar submissions.   

"Dark Souls is difficult but I don't do any of that speed challenge bullshit," he says, "it's just too damn hard and takes too much time." 

Look out for our full interview with Demetrious Johnson later this week. 

Last week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds broke 1.5 million concurrent users, announced its own subsidiary company (PUBG Corp), and revealed Squad FPP OCE servers will be confirmed "after mid-October". But the battle royale megahit rounded off the last seven days with a slew of negative Steam reviews. Why? In-game advertisement of a third-party gaming VPN in China. 

Despite being fully-localised, Chinese players complain of lag-affected local servers and are often forced to join European or North American games. Conversely, native players in these forums report migrant players bring their own lag and can be at times unplayable.

Chinese players have now reported in-game advertising for an 'accelerator' VPN service said to boost connections to international servers. The problem for these players is twofold: they feel that in-game advertising for a game that isn't free-to-play is a problem in itself; and that Bluehole could do more to support their servers as opposed to promoting the advertisement of tools used to better access foreign ones.   

The result of this unrest has seen almost 10,000 negative reviews posted to the PUBG Steam page in the last day—as outlined here: 

We've reached out to Bluehole about the situation and will report back as and when they reply.

Update: Well that's a bit embarrassing, isn't it? My original article said that the issues plaguing the game over the past few days had been fixed. But as soon as the article went out players contacted PC Gamer on Twitter to say they were still having trouble. Then, shortly after, the developers put out this tweet: 

So, it appears the problems persist for some, although it's working fine for me now. This is the error message that players are getting, and it's the same one I was getting on Thursday and Friday (hat tip to Twitter user @designmechanic):

Here's the original article below, for the record.

Original story: 

Trying to play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds over the past few days has been frustrating. I tried on Thursday, and I couldn't even reach the game's main menu screen because of a non-specified error. 

I tried again yesterday, and I could reach the menu screen if I refreshed enough times, but after that I couldn't pair up with a friend to play a Duo or Squads game. In the end, I had to give up.

Those issues are now, thankfully, resolved, so you can play to your heart's content (as I will be doing this weekend).

It appears to have worked for everyone: Twitter was awash with frustrated players yesterday and the day before, but there's been no angry tweets about the servers so far today.

Let's hope it doesn't happen again. If there's one thing that could turn players away from PUBG it's problems like this. And with competitors coming out of the woodwork (I'm looking at you, Fortnite), keeping the player base happy is now more important than ever.

While you're here, have a read of James' piece comparing Fortnite's Battle Royale mode and PUBG.

Developer Bluehole announced today that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is now being maintained by PUBG Corp, a Bluehole subsidiary "focused entirely on the development and global business opportunities" for the battle royale shooter.

PUBG development lead Chang Han Kim is now CEO of PUBG Corp, and Woonghee Cho, former CEO of Maui Games and head of business development for Neowiz, will join as COO of the new company to focus on "accelerating overall business development and managing global operations."

"This new structure allows us to be nimble as we look towards the expansion of strategic business opportunities that include the game’s potential in the esports sector and the growth of PUBG as a true global IP franchise," said Kim by way of a press release. Regarding the global part, PUBG Corp has already set up an office in the US, and plans to open offices in Europe and Japan, as well.

PUBG recently broke the record for concurrent users on Steam, and according to Bluehole it has sold over 13 million copies. Expansion was inevitable. The biggest downside to this change, as far as I can see, is that we'll all have to get around writing 'PUBG developer PUBG.'

When PUBG first launched dedicated first-person perspective servers last month, it did so exclusively in Europe and North America. When FPP did eventually arrive in the OCE region, it did not support Solo or Squad play. 

Now, the latter is planned for some point "after mid-October".

That's according to the game's official Twitter feed, which has now confirmed that Squad FPP OCE servers are en route, and that Duo FPP will be open on SA and SEA servers at the same time.

Not much else to go on as yet. But, as per the above, we can expect to learn more in two weeks.