If you still want to play it
Originally promised to release six months after Early Access this October, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been pushed back to release “before the end of Q4.” Brendan Greene explained in his blog post “I’ve come to realize that restricting the window to a specific month could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met.”
As much as I enjoyed the game for a couple weeks, I can’t say feel any burning need to play more. New maps and some tweaked features sound nice, and I still would like to see a mode without the blue circle to play long ass endurance matches. However, I feel like the game has run it’s course and it’s time to move on. In July. Hell I realized some time last month in June that “OK I won a time or two, and I’ve enjoyed a decent number of streams on the game. I’m done.”
It is a thrilling game and remarkable for getting mainstream gamers to realize how fun one-life elimination can be. It is not, however, any sort of masterpiece in its current form with just a single map and limited features. And therein lies the issue with Early Access and betas: you get people to play, enjoy, and move on from your game in a relatively rudimentary state. This limits the amount of fun people have in the time they dedicate to your game, and then by the time you complete the full thing people have moved on.
It is not dissimilar to releasing tons of DLC and expansions to a game up to a year or more than a year after release that people want to experience in their first go around. It’s never as special to load up a game you finished and moved on from to play some side story DLC. Story or no story, you’re most invested in a game when playing the first time, or in the case of something like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, when it is still new and fresh.
Give us your “fully featured game” from day one so we can best enjoy all you have to offer at once. That would be ideal, and was how gaming used to be back in the day. But now money reigns supreme. Games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds likely need the money obtained from Early Access to even fund the rest of the game.
