Microsoft hasn’t seen a blockbuster-selling game on the Xbox One console in ages. Even Halo and Gears of War have lost a lot of their sales luster over the years thanks to corporate meddling and the dilution of the formula down to little more than rinse-and-repeat recycling. Well, that was true up until Bluehole Studios’ mid-budget Battle Royale game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, found its way into the Game Preview program for the Xbox One.
VentureBeat spotted the news from a tweet that was made by Aaron Greenberg, the head of Xbox and Windows marketing, stating that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds managed to sell 1 million copies within the span of just 48 hours.
To celebrate already over 1 million players of @PUBATTLEGROUNDS on @Xbox One, we are adding the game as a very special bonus to new Xbox One X consoles between Dec 17th – 31st! #WinnerWinnerChickenDinner https://t.co/4gVSbgCkZh
— Aaron Greenberg ♂️ (@aarongreenberg) December 15, 2017
Priced at $29.99, the unfinished and unpolished survival game sees 100 players dropping in on an island and attempting to survive until they’re the last person standing.
The game is a direct ripoff of the Japanese flick Battle Royale, which had the exact same concept, save it centered around school kids.
Gamers aren’t buying PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on the Xbox One because it’s a solid game, though. They’re buying it because it’s one of the only 100-player survival games on the market, cobbled and strung together in the Unreal Engine 4 like macaroni-made Christmas decorations. That is neither hyperbole nor conjecture.
VentureBeat even had to admit that the game has its problems on the Xbox One and barely hits 30fps at times. If you aren’t playing the game on the Xbox One, you can see what some of the problems are like that some players are encountering when they boot it up and parachute down into the game world, courtesy of Crowbcat.
Due to the game’s poor frame-rate you have Xbox gamers suffering through input latency, glitchy texture-streaming, LODs not properly loading into memory, rubberbanding, and worst of all… lag.
Nevertheless, more than a million Xbox One gamers are willing to put up with all of the hiccups and haphazards, and slapdashery that come with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds‘ Game Preview launch. This is all despite the fact that the game’s creator, Brendan Greene, kowtowed to a non-troversy cooked up by Social Justice Warriors.
I mean, in some ways I can’t blame them given that the Xbox One’s library is more starved of good games than the PlayStation 4. The only semi-exclusive game of note that launched this fall on the Xbox One was Cuphead… and that was still better on PC.
Nevertheless, this also seems to prove that millions of gamers are looking for something new in the multiplayer arena. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds‘ 25 million sales isn’t some sort of fluke. Gamers just want something different from the typical 8-vs-8 multiplayer PvP they’ve been playing since 1993.
It’s embarrassing that nearly 25 years later and it took a Korean game development studio slapping together unstable code in Unreal Engine 4 to finally do something new.
Anyway, to help broaden the appeal and lure in more players, Microsoft is bundling in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (the unfinished version) with Xbox One X purchases in hopes of getting some of that sales magic to wear off on their new game console. According to the Xbox News Wire, the promotion will only be good up until December 31st, 2017.
