Jared’s Top Ten Games of This Horrible, Godforsaken Year

3. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds / Fortnite: Battle Royale

Battle fucking royale games. The type of game you never knew you needed it until you know you wanted it. And the main culprit is PUBG (which is a horrible title for the most popular game ever, and I will not be swayed on this point). It’s taken gaming by storm because A) it has a cool storm in it that kills you B) it features 100 people in a match which is the new standard I think for multiplayer shooters going forward C) you can stream it and it works really well unlike some other games that want to be ‘eSports’ D) you can play it with or against your friends and the more people you try and get to play with you the better off it is aka the League of Legends model of recruiting a team E) there are loot boxes in it and F) it’s easy to run on PC and inexpensive at only $30.

No one can really replicate that formula unless you are willing to make concessions or vastly improve on any of those major six points.

Fortunately, Epic did that by stealing the idea on the engine they lent out to Blue Hole, and simply made the mode free to boost their original game with Fortnite. Voila, you have a recipe for an instant 20 million active users, and all because that game hit consoles well before PUBG did. I’ve technically played way more Fortnite with my friends, despite liking PUBG more, and I’ve watched enough footage between Waypoint’s Breakfast and Battlegrounds, Polygon’s Awful Squad, and whatever Giant Bomb calls theirs, to last me a lifetime. It also helps that I am quite good at this game and won on release day, so I look forward to devouring more delicious noobs and Christmas noobs when more people get their hands on PUBG for Xbox.

But yeah, by the time this goes up this game will surpass 30 million copies sold and that is such an anomaly/exception to every rule in gaming that it is impossible to avoid the suction of PUBG’s black hole, it’s that important and influential, just like Minecraft was when it picked up momentum and never slowed down. I cannot wait until we get the COD 4 / MW2 version of this mode, because it will be more popular than Jesus, and maybe the Beatles when they were more popular than Jesus. What I’m saying is, Jesus is declining in popularity and I have PUBG to thank for that.

PUBG is the Dark Souls of shooters.