With over 15 million copies sold already, I think it's safe to say that a lot of people are finding PUBG to be a particularity engaging game. Personally I think it succeeds in creating frequent high-stakes situations, and making you feel that those stakes "matter." I'll expand on this thought in a subsequent post.

What do you guys think makes PUBG so engaging? How do you feel it achieves the level of engagement it does?

Conversely, are there any problems you see that prevent you from really "buying in" to the game? Why do these problems detract from your enjoyment and engagement?

Their secret is sauce is that they don't have or need any sauce, the meat on it's own is already too good.

I think it has the right amount of jank to let it stream well. I have never played it but i watched all the murder islands and have been tempted, but i thik its appealing to watch for serious gamers and people like me who just like the dumb atuff that happens sometimes(most times).

For me, this is the first Arma mod style game I've really played. I also generally don't care too much about online competitive multiplayer games. Something about this comes together. As mentioned above, it's level of 'jank' is almost endearing at the moment. I think the fact that they started with just the one location works really well - as you get to really know the map. Also, I rarely feel like I've been killed by bs, usually I die because it is my fault, I was outplayed or I could have done something better. You can get good or bad luck with RNG and how the circle goes, but that's a part of it.

The game does tension really well. I've pretty much only played solo with a couple of games here and there of squad and duo. I always feel like I am a chance of winning every solo match, but also that I could lose at any stage - it feels 'fair' in that way.

It just has a hook that I didn't expect, because these types of games typically aren't for me. I've logged 50 hours (which is a lot for me), and would have done more if I had the time.

I think it does come down to that feeling that every encounter you have with another player in PUBG is a meaningful one and every interaction you have with the items or locations of the game has an effect on those encounters which makes them meaningful by proxy. Those encounters feel meaningful because, as you said, they're pretty high stakes. It takes very relatively little to die and one death removes you from a match, but conversely you can permanently eliminate someone else very quickly. It's exciting because all combat has you in this perpetual state of being close to victory and close to loss, then throw in player dynamics where other players can show up unexpectedly and your positioning and visibility matters a lot and it creates this constant tension. Because it's a shooter at its core, the game is easy to understand even if you've had no experience with it whereas many other esports like Starcraft and DoTA are more opaque. As a shooter, it also has a kind of up-close action movie quality that has broad appeal. At the same time, the game has enough depth that you or any player you're watching play can take a journey of development with it so you can get into it easily but find a kind of evolution of play that makes you stick with it. Matches are long enough to get you invested but short enough that it's always tempting to jump into another.

These aspects are not only fun in themselves but make the game social in a couple of ways. Firstly, you can greatly reduce risk and increase reward by getting other friends to team up in the game with you, so you have a motive to expand the userbase. Secondly, all the aspects that make the game exciting and tense in-person make it exciting and tense as a viewer. I think it's for these reasons that the game did incredibly well on Twitch and that you saw a lot of major games sites starting their own series with the game. These streams definitely did a lot to popularise it. I don't think it's ever going to be CoD big because this is still a game where you can run around planning for 7 minutes and then get shot in the head, seemingly from nowhere, and that's always going to put some players off, but for what it is it's proved fairly accessible.

I think it was a combination of aspects that led to its success. It hit at the right place and the right time, the only other major title released around then was Breath of the Wild, while a massive release, was only on Switch. March is a pretty dry month for game releases, so it was a good time for it to break in. People were also getting tired of crafting mechanics in games of this nature, so PubG's streamlined gameplay came in at the correct time as well. Add on being played by a ton of streamers and presto, it was a hit in the making.

I was playing solo the other day and was riding a motorbike with sidecar through a town. I encountered two guys who were having a gun fight. I ran over one and my motorbike veered to the side and hit an incline, flying into the air. I launched over the second guy, leapt off the bike mid air, landed and got him with the shotgun I had equipped.

That was fucking cool, but also rare enough of a moment in its ridiculousness that it is just one of those things that is amazing when it happens. (I did die later that match while trying to get into the circle - in a less dramaticfashion)

Having not played the game at all (but watched a fair bit), I feel like the thing they managed to solve was the balance between action and quiet time. From what I've seen of other similar games they were usually on from minute one. PUBG allows anyone to get into to the game, play around for a while, get some suspension built up and then even if you die the first time you get into a fight you feel like you had an enjoyable experience.

Its streamlined the Arma 3 mod experience just enough for a more mainstream audience to enjoy. In terms of why its got so many sales the real answer is it's resonated with China and it's not on the Perfect World client.

Well, I think the nature of the game has made getting kills extremely satisfying, and they've struck some accidental gold just with the "Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!" text. I think the concept is great--and that they've managed to do that concept better than anyone has before, so far. It's tactical without being cumbersome.

If you want just the one thing that makes it what it is for me and also why I think it's so good, it's the circle.

The timing, speed, randomness. That's the secret for me. Combine that with a goofy, simplistic but realistic shooter and it's a winner.

I don't know because I have no interest in playing it but sometimes something comes along that people get crazy about and it goes viral as everyone gets their friends to play.

@gamer_152: You are so right. The fact that the concept is so hardcore (die and you are out of the game) makes everything so much more intense.

When you kill another player it means a lot. That player is out of the way and won't respawn in your game. Everything you find that helps your chances to survive feels awesome. The randomness makes sure you never experience the same game twice, every game is a story (some of it very short and stupid, others are great tales of survival).

I just hope that this opens the eyes of the big game development studio's; making your game a little bit more hardcore can do wonders for the experience. PUBG, Minecraft, Dark Souls, Eve-online are all good examples of that.

I think part of it is that it's using the same ingredients that DayZ used to make it successful, but PUBG took out a couple of major faults with the DayZ model

1. They solved the problem with DayZ had with campers and people hoarding supplies from newbies with both the blue wall of death and the red zones. They forced those people to move and while there are still some camping and sniping in PUBG, it wasn't as bad as DayZ was.

2. Increased the spawn rates for weapons and equipment. The biggest obstacle new players faced with DayZ was the constant search for anything, especially if you weren't on the high spawn servers. There were many people I heard from that they wished they could experience DayZ like others did, but they got tired trying to survive to find food, water, and shitty weapons.

Literally, the first thing I said when i started playing the game was "Oh cool, this is somewhat like DayZ without the tedious bullshit".

@gamer_152: This is absolutely key to the success of PUBG. Adding to this the pressure of the one death and your out also works as a release where, because you can get into another game so quickly and the low impact of that means players can feel free to play a match in a less conventional way. It has a rogue-like quality to it because of this. In a traditional competitive mode if you aren't taking it serious you ruin a match, and if you quit mid-game your often punished for it when you've done that enough times. PUBG liberates the player to take it serious when they want to or fun around and not have that be ruinous to the experience. This holds up even in squads where one person can still win the game after their team is wiped out. My favorite thing to do in the game is quickly get a motorcycle and start doing jumps off hills to grab some sweet air and try to survive as long as I can on murder island. I've had people start shooting and then stop to watch, drawn two groups together to fight it out and landed vehicles in pretty dumb ways.

Hype.

It just has this hardcore magic built in. Remember when you were young and all games were hard and every experience was a new one? This is what this games gives you, new experiences that are very hard for you to accomplish. Basically it makes you feel like a child again even though you don't realize it.

I think it executes on a few things better than most games:

1) It is a very easy game to get into. You kinda just hit play. After that, all the learning happens rather intuitively while playing the game. There's not a million menus to get through, you don't customize your character before a match, choosing loadouts etc...
The tactics and complexity of the game are actually kinda gently introduced I'd argue.

2) It's kinda the closest the world of games has come to a straight up thriller I think? It does a brilliant job of creating play that doesn't involve any direct shooting. By this I mean that a large portion of the game is spent hiding, avoiding other players yet the game always finds way to communicate their presence (i.e. you see someone running over a field in the distance, you hear a car passing by or a door opening) so it's always tense.

3) Maybe I'm just saying this because I've never won, but it also seems to me that the primary reason a lot of people play the game is for the stories it creates. Having fun/cool/weird shit happen seems far more important than "winning" in the grand scheme of things, which means that even if you lose a match it is still a ton of fun (unlike a lot of other games).

The secret sauce, I think, is that there's minimal downtime.

In most shooters that lean towards realism, they kinda follow the CS style: multiple rounds, and anyone who's eliminated has to sit and watch until the next round (if you die early, that can be 2-3 minutes of just sitting and watching). In PUBG, when you go down, you're two clicks and a short load from being interactive (the starting island) and another <90 seconds from being able to exit the plane.

I think there's a couple of layers to the secret sauce. One of the biggest contributors I think is nailing the pacing of a good Battle Royale game. In and out of matches fast. Looting lasts just long enough to fill it's purpose without overstaying it's welcome. And the circles closes at a nice speed to limit the overall length of a game. They just made it feel smooth and responsive and engaging to get into a game.

And the second layer I think is smart use of randomness and variance. A lot of games use random factors and variance to close the gap of skill between experienced and casual players, to varying levels of effectivness. PUBG succeeds because even though some factors are out of the players control, they rarely feel unfair. And everyone technically still has the same playing field. This creates a situation where good players can play to the game's system and generally end up at the top of the board, but even casual players will get the high's and low's of a really lucky or unlucky loot/circle scenario.

And to add on top of that. The game de-emphasizes winning in a way. Very few people go into a game EXPECTING to win. Everyone tries to win, and everyone COULD win. But most people don't feel like it's especially likely. That takes a lot of the edge off of playing, and helps you take losses in stride. It's much less frustrating to lose in PUBG, especially when you can get incremental victories like "top 10"! I got a kill this game! I nailed that guy with the K98! SICK! Comparing that to a perhaps a fighting game, where it's only 1v1 and the only real objective is to win the game. The latter is endlessly more frustrating for someone that hasn't invested the time to get really good.

I think PUBG is super smartly designed. It has really earned the reception it's been getting. That said though, I'm a bit bored of it personally. But I was never a huge shooter guy to begin with. ~