PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds became a new major esport discipline

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Playerunknown's Battleground is becoming a №1 game discipline with the speed of a jet plane. A few days ago PUBG defeated Dota 2 by the number of online players, and it is just the beginning. PUBG is a competitive game, so Bluehole decided to test the esport potential of their game That is how Gamescom PUBG Invitational 2017 appeared.

Bluehole agreed to cooperate with Gamescom, a major gaming industry exhibition in Cologne. They were able to organize a decent prize pool of $ 350,000. Some teams have already signed contracts with professional PUBG players, thus they have received direct invitations. Bluehole chose a great time for their tournament, end of August is the off-season period in major esports disciplines. A storm was coming.

Playerunknown's Battleground broke the record of viewers of PGL Major Kraków 2017 at the time when the stream was launched. It has happened primarily due to the huge Chinese fanbase of PUBG. Chinese players have experience in shooters, but their main discipline is not CS:GO, but Crossfire and other games, which couldn't contest with CS:GO in Europe and America.  

In the other hand we can observe a huge activity of the Western fans, at the peak there were almost 400.000 viewers. The tournament was held in all formats of the game - Solo, Duo and Squad. Obviously, the developers wanted to understand which format is the most interesting to watch.

Due to the inexperience of the organizers and the imperfection of the tournament rules, many players used bugs and glitches. For example, in a Solo tournament, the player from Korea won using the rule that the player who will survive the longest in all games will receive a huge amount of victory points. He landed on the starting island, collected all the goods and weapons there, after what he spent most of the time outside of the circle, avoiding all players and battles. Watching this is absolutely uninteresting, but the method proved to be very effective — the Korean took first place.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of technical problems in the tournament. The most comical scene was during grand final between Luminosity Gaming and T3 Gaming, when one of the player’s computer started the Windows 10 update, thus he was killed. It was the first esport tournament for Bluehole, so community was ready to forgive all these mistakes. Considering the success of this tournament, we can expect the development of the esport component of PUBG..