Whether it’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds creator Brendan Greene or developer Bluehole, neither quite expected the Battle Royale game to have as much success as its now experienced.
When Greene, who serves as creative director, pitched the idea to Bluehole, he predicted it would sell 1 million units in the first month. Speaking to Polygon he said that the development team, which was made up of gaming industry veterans, had different estimates. They predicted around 200,000 to 300,000 units sold in the first year.
“A lot of the [internal team], they really couldn’t believe it. There was a few veterans of the game industry that were [saying], like, ‘No, no. 200,000 [or] 300,000 the first year.’ But then when we hit that first million, there were a lot of smiles around the office.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has sold more than 10 million units since releasing in March, becoming perhaps the highest selling single-platform title this year (before it releases on Xbox One via Game Preview that is). It also unseated Dota 2 on with the highest number of concurrent players in history, crossing the 1 million mark fairly recently.
As for the Xbox One release, there’s currently no release date but it’s slated to arrive by 2017 end. The game is still estimated to exit Early Access in 2018.
