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. 

Despite restructuring its schedule, PUBG has received three updates in the last two weeks—one fog-related, one grenade-related, and now one bug and UI-related. The latter is the battle royale 'em up's 27th Weekly Update, and it's now live. 

As outlined in this Steam Community post, the latest patch introduces enhanced breathing animations in Spectator mode, as well as a new feature that lets players adjust the zoom-in and zoom-out speed on the World Map. 

Bug fix-wise, the Weekly Update 27 targets a graphics bug that occurred when players left the game while still in the starting airplane, and another which stopped players from seeing the full alias of their teammates. 

Syncronisation between player aim and spectator aim has been tweaked, and a bug that prevented teammates' marker direction in Free Look mode has been quashed. Shadows will no longer vanish mid-game, too. 

And on another note entirely, PUBG developer Bluehole is now said to be worth over four billion US dollars. According to this Bloomberg article (via Shack News), Bluehole Inc. is said to be valued at around $4.6—a figure reflected by the runaway mega hit's ever-increasing success.

What if you could build your own bathroom in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds? Fortnite's surprise Battle Royale mode asks this very question, and the answer is that so far no one wants to build any bathrooms except me. But they do want to build big boxes and ramps into the sky, sniper towers jutting out of mountainsides and impregnable cubes at the center of the storm's slowly shrinking circle.

Such constructions come by way of Fortnite's intuitive fort building system, which make the endgame encounters in a battle royale format feel like a week-long siege in Rust playing out in four minutes. It sounds like a fun idea and a nice companion mode to Fortnite's bloated PvE base defense, but Epic barely leverages what makes Fortnite unique and instead goes for the best PUBG impression it can muster. It's a problem, and not just for players.

Bluehole isn't trying to claim ownership of the battle royale game mode, but some of Epic's early marketing makes their inspiration clear by invoking PUBG directly. And, frankly, almost every major system in Fortnite's version is taken straight from PUBG. You start each match in a lobby where you can run around and bash other players over the head. No human centipedes though. 

You leap from an airborne bus (what is a plane if not a bus that flies?) to an island dotted with ruins, townships, and shacks below. A big blue sphere slowly closes in while the match carries on—it's PUBG from tip to toe in presentation, but it plays out in much more simple, unsurprising ways.

The long log jog

Fortnite's Battle Royale's biggest sin is its lack of vehicles. You'll be hoofing it across the map, for now at least, but the absence of buggies and motorcycles that disagree with physics means the wacky happenings that make PUBG so clip-worthy aren't even present to begin with. Every mad dash to get inside the shrinking circle will be on foot across a map with plenty of space between points of interest. At least there's no limited stamina pool like in Fortnite's primary PvE modes. I miss the mad dashes to grab a vehicle as a last ditch effort to beat the shield, but with everyone moving at the same pace there's no incentive to play at the edges (or far beyond them).

RIP, Weed_Man. 

The absence of vehicles is made worse by Fortnite's art style. While it looks nice, characters cut sharp silhouettes from far across the map and the foliage isn't dense enough to produce natural cover between places to hunker down. Characters and clothing aren't customizable yet either, assigned at random at the beginning of each map. With camo out the window, movement tactics are limited to sprinting between trees like a slow Looney Toon.

Transferring a third-person combat system built for chipping away at swarms of zombies doesn't make a neat transition to fast-paced, methodical competitive play either. It doesn't have the mechanical depth of similar games—no ability to move the camera to look around independent of your aim, no prone stance, no first person aim. It's missing a dimension of complexity, not necessarily because it's not realistic enough, but because your options for survival are mostly limited to not being seen or shooting first. The sandbox just feels empty right now, even with such an intuitive and elaborate fort building system available to every player. 

In the early game while the Storm's Eye (the big blue circle of death) is at its maximum diameter, homegrown buildings aren't very useful or worth the time. You can use your pickaxe to tear down nearly anything you see to get wood, metal, and brick, but stopping to hole up in your own tiny fort only paints a target on your back. Amateur architecture won't stop the big blue bubble from closing in on you anyway. 

A safe haven is no longer a safe haven if it can be destroyed. Hunkering down in a bathroom and watching the door loses some tactical appeal if the floor can fall out from below you, but I can imagine feeling pretty clever if I were the one deconstructing. But I'm not that clever. What might make feel better is a bigger emphasis on Fortnite's floor, wall, and ceiling traps. If I'm going to hole up in a building as a last ditch effort to survive, give me way more floor spikes and bounce pads. Turn what would be a routine encounter in PUBG into a miniature gauntlet—a family-friendly Rainbow Six Siege. Right now, they're so rare I've only come across a few, and fewer choice opportunities to use them.

I suppose small forts could be deployed as decoys and ramps can be used ascend a tower to worm out an enemy without much effort, but I see the building system used to create cover on the fly more than for the purposes of subterfuge. Throwing up a short wall for impromptu cover can be difficult to manage in a firefight—the function keys are way up there—but they can change the outcome of an encounter completely. 

Rockets, man 

I watch most matches to the end to see what the best players are doing, and one in particular highlighted the best aspects of Fortnite's Batte Royale while leaving what's missing in sharp relief. With only 10 players left, the Storm's Eye closed in on a few small mountains with deep gullies between them. Most players were decked out with snipers and plenty of building materials by the end, so they each built a tower into the sky from their own mountains and had a slow, tense shootout, stopping, popping, and rooftopping. 

Once the player I was shadowing sniped everyone on the ground (it's really easy to shoot players at long distance), it was down to two. To find the other player, rather than heading down the mountain, exposing himself, and getting picked off, he built a floor from his sniper nest to a different mountaintop entirely. He spotted the final player below, sent a bullet or two his way, but then the guy desperately started throwing up wood walls. It just so happens our guy had a few rockets, which beat wood, and he delivered that poor man and his leanto straight to hell.

Mix in far more trap drops and Fortnite's Battle Royale is one step closer to becoming distinct enough, a free-for-all tower defense match happening inside an electric blue trash compactor. With the addition of squads of four players and duos, the endgame fortress standoffs will likely get more elaborate and strange. I really hope so, and I hope Epic takes note and leans into what makes Fortnite unique.

It's a weird experience that I can't recommend—not as an alternative to PUBG for its more approachable style and control, not to experience the goofball sandbox, and not to experience Fortnite's building system. It's capable of being a good time, but because Fortnite uses PUBG as such a strict blueprint, everything it's competent at is diminished by PUBG's fidelity and months of iteration. If Fortnite: Battle Royale excels at one thing, though, it's at costing zero dollars to play.