Trivia / PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

• Author's Saving Throw: The "Fix PUBG" campaign by the developers, which acknowledged all the issues people had with the game and made it their goal to fix them from August to October 2018. This includes but is not limited to frame drops, cheating, desync, and a bunch of quality-of-life bugs.
• Banned in China:
  • The mobile version has been banned in Nepal, parts of India, Iraq, Jordan, and Bhutan, apparently for being too violent and addictive. However, these bans were lifted and appealed in both India and Nepal. It was again banned in India due to the June 2020 Ladakh border conflict with China and fears over its connection to Tencent. The PC and console versions are still available, though, since only the mobile version was developed by Tencent Games. Despite this, many Indian players use VPN to bypass the ban due to the game's popularity there. In response, Krafton launched an India-only version of the game, Battlegrounds Mobile India.
  • Not directly banned, but after being refused for monetization due to the contents being objectionable to China's new entertainment regulations, Tencent released a rebranded version of the game that's less bloody and more nationalistic.
• Dolled-Up Installment: A weird example due to the above. Battlegrounds Mobile India and Peacekeeper Elite (formerly Game For Peace) are technically PUBG Mobile, but for the former, the servers are limited to India and released without the PUBG brand to dissociate the publishers from Level Infinite/Tencent, and the latter is a less violent version with endorsement from the Chinese military.
• Dueling Games:
  • For the PC and console, it's dueling with Fortnite's battle royale mode and Apex Legends, both of which were created to capitalize on the battle royale formula created by PUBG.
  • For the mobile, there were almost half-dozen play-alikes, until it's pared down to Garena Free Fire (a more lightweight Battle Royale game by Garena with half the number of players in normal gameplay modes, initially released as a direct response to the explosive popularity of PUBG at its 2017 launch), Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile (which managed to do the 100-player Battle Royale in mobile but also have gameplay modes for 50 players as well), and PUBG's sister game New State Mobile (formerly PUBG New State, intended as a B-Team Sequel made by internal developers of Krafton itself instead of Tencent Games' Lightspeed and Quantum)
• Follow the Leader:
  • PUBG's growth and popularity spurned the introduction of battle royale modes in other games, first it was mobile games, and then, most controversially, Fortnite, which Blue Hole had considered taking legal action against. However, the latter being a free game and having less issues than the former granted Fortnite an advantage, and is, by February 2018, the more-played game out of the two. There's even a battle royale version of Tetris of all things, Tetris 99.
  • In turn, PUBG's console and mobile versions copied several mechanics from its imitators (such as auto-loot, team deathmatch modes, 50-player quick game modes, and Deployable Cover), making things come full circle.
    • After the release of Apex Legends, the console and mobile versions got Apex-style auto-equip and parachuting with teammates options, and PUBG integrated a similar ping system called Radio Messages. The mobile version would also had Recall Tower to call back dead teammates.
    • After the release of Call of Duty: Mobile, the mobile version of PUBG released a similar battle royale called Payload Mode, which has helicopters and more exotic weapons like RPGs and grenade launchers. The Team Deathmatch mode also experimented with commands for sliding, similar to CODM's movement commands, and weapon loadouts.
• No Export for You: In China, Tencent commissioned two Reformulated Games based on PUBG. The "Exhilarating Battlefield" one is faithful to the source material, and being published worldwide as Playerunknown's Battlegrounds Mobile. The other one, "Army Attack" adds more vehicles and game modes, yet it didn't leave China as of now, and with the release of Peacekeeper Elite replacing PUBG in China along with Timi (the makers of Army Attack) focusing developments toward Call of Duty Mobile, it probably never will.
• Sleeper Hit: The game was directed by a former modder, for a what was then a very niche genre, by a team of completely unknown developers, and turned out to be one of the biggest games in 2017, while it was in early access. It sold twenty million copies and has a peak concurrent player count of over two million players, and was even nominated for Game of the Year award for TGA 2017.^note The other nominees are all juggernauts like Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Super Mario Odyssey, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
• Throw It In!: While Greene and one of the lead programmers, Marek Krasowski, were figuring out how to add collision to the frying pan—so that players could swat grenades away with it—a coding error accidentally made it bulletproof, and it's since stayed that way thanks to Rule of Fun.
• Tuckerization: Erangel is partly named after Brendan Greene's daughter Eryn. Theories about the "angel" part of the name include implying she's an angel, or a play on the Russian island Wrangel.
• What Could Have Been: Miramar was originally conceived as a 4x4 kilometer-large map rather than having the 8x8 kilometers it was sized at upon release, with the following map Sanhok having 4x4 kilometers instead.