The world is not the field of dreams. Don't move forward with a plan like this.

Pubg was made by an extremely well known modder with a huge following.

So many people have the mistaken impression that marketing doesn't matter. There is a reason companies like Google can make billions of dollars a year selling ads. It is because marketing is actually incredibly important.

> The world is not the field of dreams. Don't move forward with a plan like this.

This is like rocket fuel for me. Thank you.

Making the best game you can is table stakes. To get those gamers crawling through glass you need them to know it exists.

Extremely well known and experienced modder, PLUS a highly competent Korean game development studio.

So essentially, AA production values and a highly talented game designer who'd perfected the gameplay formula.

You’ve very much got some survivorship bias and distorted facts here. It’s easy to look at PUBG, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley then assume that a one-man show that’s good enough will naturally sell a million copies. The reality is that those are exceptions with their own unique stories, lots of embedded marketing/existing following, and “right time right place” luck. You don’t see the mountain of great, but failed indie games that creators worked just as hard on.

Yes you and every other game dev want that.

The gameplay wasn't novel in PUBG. Battle Royale games (mostly from the same Brendan Greene) were a thing for years before that, and they were massively popular, enough to set the hype train running. The only relatively novel thing compared to the previous games was their solution to the teaming issue, as they separated solo and team modes.

What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.

And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.

PUBG was iterative, it didn't happen overnight.