It's hard to believe PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is only a year old. After Chris exclusively revealed its official trailer in early March, the battle royale 'em up parachuted into Steam's Early Access initiative on the 23rd of the same month. And, well, you know the rest. 

Now, developer PUBG Corp is celebrating its anniversary by treating players to a complimentary skin. The 'Year One—SCAR-L' jazzes up my (and your?) favourite PUBG weapon with a splash of yellow, the number one and the game's iconic match-winning catchphrase: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner.  

Voila:

This follows news of PUBG's new weapon system and crates, and the fact the developer is "considering" region-locked servers of sorts. 

While researching this story, I rediscovered another article of Chris' titled Playerunknown's Battlegrounds could have a bright future in the battle royale genre he created. It's a great read with today's perspective in mind.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' latest test build introduces a new weapon skin system and new cosmetic crates. Developer PUBG Corp is also contemplating a version of region-locked servers. 

"We are always working towards improving the gameplay environment," reads this Steam Community update post. "This includes providing stable network experience for our players. You all know that we have implemented ping based matchmaking system that has shown great results but we didn't want to stop there. 

"One of the solutions we are considering is operating servers so that only those players who reside in that region can connect and play. These servers will be made invisible to players residing in other regions. But, at the same time, if a player in an exclusive server region forms a team with a player from another region, they can connect to and play on any of the servers available to either of them." 

Last week, Brendan Greene—aka PlayerUnknown himself—appeared to downplay the possibility of region-locked servers in conversation with US Gamer, however the developer reckons this proposed approach aims to offer a "better gameplay experience" and will help improve both network issues and linguistic barriers. 

The post adds: "We are going to run a limited test of this approach as more detailed research and analysis should come before global application."

Elsewhere, the Steam Community post explores the new weapons skins system which comes with a tweaked UI. Skins can be picked up via the paid-for Triumph crate (unlocked with a Weapon Cosmetic Key), and/or the free-of-charge Raider crate.

Drop rates and further information on skins and crates themselves can be found in this direction. The latest update is live now on test servers, while transition to live servers will follow four hours of downtime later today/early tomorrow morning. Details of that are outlined here:

After giving a talk at GDC about his journey from a DayZ and Arma modder to the creative director of PUBG Corp., Brendan Greene was asked an inevitable question from a member of the audience: "What are your thoughts on Fortnite?"

"I have many thoughts," Greene said. 

"No, it's great," he continued after some laughter from the crowd. "I mean it's great that the battle royale space is expanding, and that Fortnite is getting [the] battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That's it, really."

Greene followed up with some thoughts on how developers are often seen to be pitted against one another in a competition where only one game can come out on top while the others are destroyed—something he thinks is far from accurate.

"I get asked these questions sometimes, like, what do you do to combat this? When [PUBG] came out, we were killing [H1Z1]. When H1 came out it was killing Arma 3. We never set out to kill these games. I don't understand this attitude, like, 'you're dead'. We're all relatively friendly here. We don't have a real life GDC battle royale."

"I've really tried to combat that perception that I want other people's games to die," he continued. "It's great that more people are exploring the space and more people are getting to play games."