PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a household name at this point since it helped propel the battle royale-style game into unprecedented popularity. Fortnite took the genre to new heights, and now new entries in long-running franchises are adopting the style; namely Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Battlefield V. We had the chance to speak with Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, and one of the many topics of discussion was the emergence of big names doing battle royale, and if that affects PUBG's development in any way.
During the interview, Greene said, "Oh, no. We have our own internal roadmap. And of course there's going to be competitors. This year is a battle royale of battle royales. Everyone has their own royale, which is great, I love seeing the genre grow. It's going to be interesting to see if it's going to develop as a full genre."
Greene continued, "We look internally, we have our own goals. We don't really look at what other people are doing. We kind of have blinders on. We've had these, sort of, stretch goals for quite some time. While, yes, competition is great to keep people on their toes, we don't necessarily look at what others are doing."
At Microsoft's E3 2018 press conference, PUBG made its big announcement that a snow map is on the way to both PC and Xbox One versions of the game. It's set to launch sometime in Winter 2018, and it will be the fourth map in PUBG's rotation. No details were given as to how the snow map will be designed. The third and much smaller map, named Sahnok, will go live for PC players on June 22 and for Xbox One users sometime in the Summer this year.
There's an on-going story among battle royale games, too. Development studio PUBG Corp. filed a lawsuit against Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, for copyright infringement in Korea. Epic is also the company behind the Unreal Engine, for which both PUBG and Fortnite are built on. You can read more details in our story here.