If Brendan Greene actually did run naked across E3's showfloor, I reckon PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds would only sell more copies than it already has. In just four months, the battle royale shooter has accrued over six million sales—and has surpassed the likes of Fallout 4 and GTA 5 so far as peak player records are concerned—which is pretty good going for a game still living in Early Access. 

By the time the next E3 rolls around, PUBG should be well into full release, and while creator Brendan Greene first suggested he and his team required just six months to grow the game pre-launch, he recently admitted "Q4" was a more realistic target window. This pushes the game by just a few more months, however Greene puts his initial optimism down to his own naivety.   

"Oh yeah, I'm very confident," Greene tells me when asked if launch before the end of the year is feasible. "I made promises when we started development in a range of things. That came from naivety on my part—I don't have a lot of experience of the industry, and making games is quite hard at times. Plans change, things have to be tested, things need to be added to make sure that when we do get to full release at the end of the year that everything works well."

Greene notes that despite his earlier six month suggestion, his latest estimation doesn't extend the game's launch timeframe by an inordinate amount. Tying themselves to a specific month risks leaving certain features behind, says Greene, and he's most interested in delivering the features he and his team have said they would in a more responsible manner. 

Throughout, he praises the hardworking nature of the Bluehole staff, how lucky a position he's now in, and how the game is better than him as an individual. 

"I'm lucky to be where I am. As much as I might moan about [eg constant travelling], I'm so lucky to be doing this. It's been an amazing four months," Greene explains. "I think a lot of people don't realise it's been that short and a lot of the complaints that we receive, we sometimes try to remind people we've been out four months and that this is a work in progress. 

"We've tried to be open about our development and really show people how games are made. We've got about nearly 100 people on the team now in Korea and maybe another ten in Madison. But the people who work on content are a very small part of the team. It's a credit to our boss, he's focusing on expanding and getting a team together so that we can create this service for the next five to ten years or thereafter. 

"I can never say how lucky I am enough to have found this team. I could run naked through E3 and make the biggest PR disaster of all time and the game would still be finished. That's the beautiful thing: the game will be complete, the game will be finished, the game will be fine no matter what I do. I'm so lucky to have that, I can't express how thankful I am of the team."

Greene adds that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that while everyone can't always agree within the online spectrum, his focus remains locked on getting PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds finished. "And no matter what drama is surrounding the game," he says "we're still focused on making the game."

All going to plan, PUBG will launch in full by the end of 2017. 

As you might have spied a couple of weeks back, we caught up with former NFL star-turned-Hollywood actor Terry Crews about his newfound love of PC gaming. Prior to the interview, I planned to ask Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Sergeant Jeffords if he'd ever played PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. He instead beat me to it, billing Bluehole's runaway success as his favourite game at the moment by his own volition. 

Shortly after we posted the interview, PUBG's creator Brendan Greene tweeted this: "Holy shit! One of my favorite actors plays my game!! Thanks @terrycrews <3"

"It's crazy," Greene tells me over Skype. "Ever since Arma 2 Battle Royale and Arma 3 BR, I've had internet famous people playing the game. But to have an actual celebrity who is genuinely famous worldwide? It blows me away. I think I saw that Alan Tudyk played on Machinima, he's a console player and couldn't quite get used to the controls, but seeing people like that, people I admire, playing my game it just warms the heart."

Terry Crews' foray into PC gaming was spurred by an equally heart-warming display of father-son bonding. Likewise Crews' passion for our platform of choice has been at times adorable, however I ask Greene which other celebs he'd like to see locking and loading in PUBG's murdergrounds. 

"Oh… well I'd love to see my captain Jean-Luc playing but that would probably never happen," says Greene. "It's not like me being starstruck, although Terry followed me on Twitter which blows me away. That's like: fucking hell. I'm trying to think which celebrities to say here, I don't watch a lot of TV. The reason I like Terry Crews is because I watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine on repeat I love that show. It helps me go to bed at night as I've got a small bit of tinnitus in one ear due to DJ'ing too much. I could repeat half the phrases in it."

Greene adds: "I can't think of any celebrities, though, it's like when someone asks you what your favourite tune is, there's just too many to choose from. Terry seems like a genuinely nice guy. But I imagine you find that with a lot of stars. When I was a DJ I went to the winter music conference in Miami one year and got to meet my heroes - DJs that I fucking loved - and they were all just lovely people. They love what they do, and I'm lucky to be in a position where I get to do something that I love. You have to be nice!"

If you're reading this, Sir Patrick Stewart, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds currently lives in Early Access and is due to launch in full in "Q4, 2017".

Twitch Plays Battlegrounds is simultaneously one of the most brilliant, and most absurd, ideas I've encountered in a long time. As the name suggests, it enables a PUBG character to be controlled by an audience of Twitch viewers. But unlike other such efforts we've seen, such as Dark Souls or Punch Club, this one works entirely in real-time: Players enter commands in the chat to move, shoot, adjust the camera, and so forth, and the bot (with allowances for lag) responds immediately. 

"The vision behind this channel is one of curiosity, collaboration, and patience," the channel's welcome message explains. "The command list is a living document, being updated frequently to improve quality of life for you all. If you have suggestions, don't hesitate to get in contact with me. I am working on ways to reduce the latency between chat and stream, and make the user experience as smooth as possible. All with the ultimate goal in mind of sharing a chicken dinner with all of you." 

The catch, naturally, is that with hundreds of people involved in the process, each with their own idea of what should be done, chaos is inevitable—and by all rights, paralysis should result. Yet somehow, this gong show on wheels not only managed to rack up two kills, it actually finished a match in third place in just its second day of operation.

At least one of the two kills appears to be a gift from a player who knew what was going on—the enemy character runs up to the bot and then stands still while taking a beatdown—and it seems pretty clear that the bot's success, such as it is, is based wholly on discretion being the better part of valor. But the crowdsourced flailing can be awfully entertaining to watch, even if it's sometimes hard to tell what exactly is going on. 

Alas, a chicken dinner was just out of reach—and death, when it came, was hilariously inglorious. Still, third place is a hell of a lot better than many "real" players manage. Perhaps there's a lesson in there somewhere?

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 307. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

A hundred people are dropped on an island full of guns, and the last one alive wins. That’s the beautifully simple premise of Battlegrounds, the survival game taking the internet by storm. A storm that I’m hopelessly caught up in.

At first I was treating it like a deathmatch, tooling up with any guns I could scavenge and seeking other players out in an attempt to shoot my way to the top of the food chain. But I was dying quickly, and embarrassingly, without even scraping the top 50.

So I decided to take a different approach. I started playing the game like an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. Hiding instead of attacking. Sneaking through the foliage, holing up in buildings, letting other players pass rather than engaging them in a firefight.

I’ll still kill people, but only if I’m backed into a corner and have no choice, or if someone is easy pickings. It’s hard to resist when a player hasn’t seen you and you have a clear shot—especially if they’re toting a fancy weapon or wearing a nice-looking hat.

But the game does have ways of keeping cautious players on their toes. Over the course of a match the play area gets incrementally smaller, represented by a shrinking circle. Stay outside the circle for too long and a wall of blue energy will sap your health until you expire. Also, large areas of the playfield are pummeled by terrifying airstrikes at random.

So you have to keep moving, even if you’re just trying to stay hidden. And when the circle shrinks and forces you out of your hideyhole, there’s a very real chance of running into another player. Especially in the later stages of a match, when there are only a handful of players left, when the circle contracts to the size of a Quake deathmatch map.

Playing Battlegrounds like this makes it feel like a stealth game, but with real, thinking humans instead of AI-controlled guards, and it’s incredibly tense as a result. It’s the only game other than Dark Souls to make my heart properly pound with excitement. And it’s the most fun I’ve had in an online game since I was deep into the similarly nerve-racking DayZ.

The only thing I miss from DayZ is how everyone on the map isn’t necessarily out to kill you. I love bumping into someone in Chernarus and that uneasy moment of figuring out whether they’re going to attack you or not. But in Battlegrounds everyone wants to kill everyone else, so running into another player almost certainly results in violence.

I’m getting better at being a coward. I’ve made it as far as sixth using stealth, and I’m hoping to win one match without any aggression. But when I play in a group, the safety of numbers makes me a lot more trigger-happy, and attacking other squads is the best way to play the game with friends. It’s a totally different experience.

Battlegrounds has sold over 6 million copies and is so cosy at the top of the Steam charts, it’s just bought a house there. But unlike many Early Access darlings, I feel like this one entirely deserves its ridiculous success and the $60 million it has reportedly generated.

Although being a popular Steam game, it does have a tendency to attract some of the worst people in the world. Do yourself a favour and disable voice chat before you play, because the prematch lobby is a sea of idiot racists and edgy teens.

According to Steam Spy, around six million people now own PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Yesterday, the sales tracking site reckons around 481,304 players took to Bluehole's open world battle royale murder grounds—a figure which elevates it above the likes of Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Payday 2, so far as peak player counts are concerned. 

As the screen below clearly identifies, PUBG now holds the peak player record for any non-Valve game.

And Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown himself, seemed pretty happy when revealing the news yesterday via Twitter. 

Last week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds surpassed five million sales and then six million sales shortly after. As such, its meteoric success since landing in Early Access in March shows little sign of slowing down. With mod support, new maps and extensive character customisation options planned some ways down the line, the future looks good for PUBG too.  

As it stands, Bluehole hopes to launch PUBG in full before the end of the year.  

Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's Arma 3 mod has catapulted him to success, and now he wants to let people mod his game in the hope of finding "the next PlayerUnknown".

In an interview with Cnet, he said the team behind the sensation that is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds were trying to find a way to allow the community to tweak the title without allowing piracy. 

"We have to do it carefully because because we're very protective of our server files," he said. "Allowing people to run their own dedicated servers would mean releasing the server files and that could lead to piracy. It's something we want to do, but it might take us a bit of time to actually implement it, because we really have to figure out the best way to do it so the game still stays secure."

The goal, ultimately, is to allow other players to created spin-off games the same way that he did with Arma 3. "I want to try to find someone who creates a game mode or a mod for my game that propels them to fame, and gets them to make their own game too. I want to find the next PlayerUnknown."

He also spoke about the future of Battlegrounds, which is still in Early Access ahead of a planned release later this year. He thinks of the title as a "service, not as a game", and says it could hang around for the next 10 years.

"Over the coming years, we're just going to keep upgrading and keep improving and keep adding to the game, much like what Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has done.

"We're not looking at this as a short term game, we're looking at this as something we want to do for the next 10 years."

Unfortunately, it sounds like the two new maps he's working on — one of which, a desert map, is seen above — won't actually be part of the game on release. Greene said he's going to post a blog soon to "temper expectations" on the new arenas.

"I'm not sure about the two new maps being ready, one of them may be... we're going to do a blog post about the current state of the new maps. 

"The images we released a few weeks ago, they were what we call a beautiful corner, where the artist spends a lot of time creating a small patch to give a sense of what the overall map looks like, and it gives a false impression that these maps are really far along. I'll be going into that a bit in my dev blog so we can temper people's expectations."

The full interview is here.