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They got it to the market quickly and made a couple of billion. While we can hindsight now about some very poor choices they made -- choices that opened them up

They got it to the market quickly and made a couple of billion. While we can hindsight now about some very poor choices they made -- choices that opened them up to rampant cheating with little ability to block it -- they made bank and have already had a success curve that has gone far longer than most games do, regardless of how perfectly they were executed.

ufo 7y ago
What kind of bad choices are you talking about here? Was it things such as the engine giving too much information to the clients?
- endorphone 7y ago
  That and trusting client information with extraordinarily few server-side validation such as, for instance, impossible shots, impossible movements, impossible speed, etc. It does no client information culling (beyond a large circle of information around the player's position) enabling wallhacks, aimhacks, etc. These are hard problems to solve on the server side, and require resources, so it was easier not to worry about it at all, and at most do post-game analysis occasionally to try to retroactively detect the impossible (with a very low detection rate, so much so that they rely upon user reports). This is one of the selling points of something like Stadia (which has to be balanced with the downside of latency) -- by default a cloud renderer would give minimal information to the client.
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bhouston 7y ago
Did they make a couple billion? I think that is grossly overestimated.
- jsnell 7y ago
  Depends both on how you define "they" and "make". PUBG Corp has made roughly a couple of billion USD in revenue, but definitely not a couple of billion in profit. (The 2018 numbers were $920M revenue, $311 in profit.) But also, that's PUBG-the-company, not PUBG-the-game. The distinction is that the PUBG mobile version (with tens of millions of daily actives) is by Tencent, and PUBG-the-company gets some kind of licensing revenue from it.

ufo 7y ago

What kind of bad choices are you talking about here? Was it things such as the engine giving too much information to the clients?

endorphone 7y ago
That and trusting client information with extraordinarily few server-side validation such as, for instance, impossible shots, impossible movements, impossible speed, etc. It does no client information culling (beyond a large circle of information around the player's position) enabling wallhacks, aimhacks, etc. These are hard problems to solve on the server side, and require resources, so it was easier not to worry about it at all, and at most do post-game analysis occasionally to try to retroactively detect the impossible (with a very low detection rate, so much so that they rely upon user reports). This is one of the selling points of something like Stadia (which has to be balanced with the downside of latency) -- by default a cloud renderer would give minimal information to the client.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

bhouston 7y ago

Did they make a couple billion? I think that is grossly overestimated.

jsnell 7y ago
Depends both on how you define "they" and "make". PUBG Corp has made roughly a couple of billion USD in revenue, but definitely not a couple of billion in profit. (The 2018 numbers were $920M revenue, $311 in profit.) But also, that's PUBG-the-company, not PUBG-the-game. The distinction is that the PUBG mobile version (with tens of millions of daily actives) is by Tencent, and PUBG-the-company gets some kind of licensing revenue from it.