“Streaming platforms critical to our success” says PUBG’s executive producer

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which launches today, has been a darling of the Twitch scene since it launched in early access earlier this year.

To celebrate the game’s 1.0 launch on PC, we spoke to CH Kim, CEO of PUBG Corp and executive producer of the game, to see what effect streaming had on the game:

"This is one of the first examples of when a game is very spectatable and enjoyable to watch, this allows it to be more powerful than a lot of the other marketing vehicles that triple-A products use," said Kim to MCV, via a translator.

"Obviously the core gameplay itself has to be appealing and replayable but for that to expand out, we feel that streaming platforms have been critical to our success."

It’s been a remarkable success, hitting its official launch day with over 20m copies sold, which is an achievement few can hope to better. The team has already grown tremendously, with most of the development spread out across an office in Korea and one in Madison, Wisconsin. The team are also looking at opening a European office, although this is still in the planning stages.

The game’s success on streaming and video on-demand services has shown, for PUBG Corp, that the game has legs and can continue for several years, but most importantly it allowed them to take the community with them through development.

"We feel like that as opposed to managing the community, we actually take an approach where we pretty much co-developed the game with the community through our open development approach," said Kim.

"Starting from the very early stage of development, we want to get the core fans of this genre involved to test out the build and we did that from a very early stage. One thing we learnt for sure from the process  is how powerful that process can be and how helpful it can be for developing the game as well."