PUBG Launches Event Passes, Immediately Annoying Game’s Dedicated Fanbase

After its launch, it didn’t take long for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to become one of the most played games on the planet. Even today, as of the time of writing, the game has peaked at 1.4 million concurrent players today – twice as many as the #2, Dota 2. PUBG is clearly still a dominant battle royale game, despite the amount of competition coming out, but with how annoyed its playerbase is, we’re wondering how long that’s going to continue being the case.

Complaints about the lack of optimization in PUBG have been rampant ever since its launch, but at first, it seemed hopeful that we’d end up seeing improvements, especially after the game took off, and the money began pouring in. Instead, we’ve seen the game released for other platforms, including mobile, and also the Xbox – a port that has its own slew of issues. Ultimately, the game still remains unoptimized to this day, but that’s just the beginning of the complaints.

This week, PUBG‘s developers unveiled Event Passes, allowing gamers to shell out some cash in exchange for more levels, more missions, and more potential permanent garb. From the FAQ: “If you’re playing without purchasing the event pass, you’ll receive the Nickname Change item and permanently unlock the parachute (obtainable at level 20), but all other earned cosmetic items will expire. However, if you purchase the event pass, you will be able to obtain a lot more cosmetic items that will not expire even after the event period. All temporary items (marked with the timer icon) will expire regardless of purchasing the event pass.”

Over at the PUBG subreddit, a thread started by Ford117 half a day ago has since garnered over 50,000 upvotes, and even 9 gilds (a gild is effectively a $4 monthly subscription for reddit perks given by other users). It’s a massive amount of attention for such a simple thread, simply calling for answers about why fans continue to get the shaft as the developers ignore major issues.

Ford117 complains about the lack of fulfilled promises from the game’s developer, PUBG Corporation. “They promised us no DLC but while the maps are free, missions, rewards, and progression will come at a cost.”, a complaint that comes after crates requiring keys (which largely require real $$$) were unveiled, and now these new Event Passes, all at a time when cheating is still incredibly rampant. Making matters even worse is that the Xbox version of the game still doesn’t have all of the content that the PC and mobile version does, a slap to the face of those who purchased a PUBG Xbox bundle hoping for a great experience.

This is all a bit of a shame, because PUBG is a fantastic game, one that proved so good, it almost immediately spawned a number of clones – even from the industry’s most reputable developers. Why development and progress is so seemingly misguided, we’re not entirely sure, but what we are sure about is that people are none-too-happy. It’d be unfortunate to see the game begin to make a dramatic decline in numbers due to unhappy players, when the solution seems so simple to its fans.