This is something I mentioned about before (where I was also critical about the lack of a road map). I’m also a seasoned investor in the stock market and have seen irrational exuberance during the dot.com era as well as the bubble bursting big time where a lot of highly leveraged positions were taken out in quick order. Hype can only carry something so far before the bottom falls out. And not having an actual plan to weather the inevitable dips, will only result in poor kneejerk decision making.
While it may just be a short term blip, PUBG’s growth numbers to say the least, is also reaching the point of being unsustainable. Part of that is saturation as well as competition from other similar titles (that includes Fortnite BR). What I’ve also mentioned before is how this is uncharted territory for Bluehole and its subsidiary, PUBG Corp. If anyone can show me a large scale Korean designed game (which are mostly in the MMO space) that is polished AND fully optimized on the PC platform, then I will believe that PUBG Corp has the actual expertise to get this title into a better optimized state than what currently exists. I personally do not believe that inherent quality exists in large numbers in many of these Korean development studios.
It was easy to make excuses using the early access moniker but now, they are going to have to deliver not only on that, but how they plan to grow the experience beyond the initial hype stage where they will have a captive customer base. As I’ve noted before, battle royale (and its concept) was not created by PUBG Corp. This player base can shift to the next hype train once that happens. That is why they’ve been trying to do partnerships and also trying to get the game involved in e-sports. That part remains a challenge though because of how much rampant exploiting exists in titles of this genre. Security is also usually not a top design consideration which adds to the challenge of designing in-game systems to deal with this. PUBG Corp in the mean time publishes numbers on the amount of cheaters they have banned as a show of good faith effort that they are “serious” about dealing with hackers and exploiters.
The reality when actual prize money comes into play via the e-sports angle, is that the bad actors will pull out all the stops to cheat. I personally just do not see them being able to handle this area very well where it creates an indelible stain on this franchise. I guess I would have a different take if Bluehole as a whole (pun intended) had treated their other franchises better; TERA being this unoptimized mess on PC while Devilian being completely ignored to the point where the mobile version failed and the PC version is all but shuttered (some of it the fault of signing with a lousy NA/EU publisher) except in one small market where its game server has been offline more often than it has been online in the past 3 months.
It’s why a part of me believes that Bluehole will end up learning the hard lesson of hubris (where they may one day have this corporate shell called PUBG Corp that couldn’t quite figure out how to sustain their sole franchise and instead, blew a lot of their cash on excess instead of having a solid long term business plan).
