PUBG or the PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds is an online multiplayer war game that is played on smart phones by teenagers and young adults. Today the addiction to the game has reached such proportions that parents don’t know how to deal with their children. Perhaps one of the reasons why the SSLC results announced by MBOSE on Monday saw the schools of Shillong not performing well while schools from the other districts of the state captured some of the best twenty positions, is also because students in rural Meghalaya are either digitally badly connected or their parents cannot afford mobile phones. A good number of high school and college students as well as adults with time on their hands are seen with earphones on and their fingers typing away on their mobile phones. The game is inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, and expanded into a stand-alone game under Brendan Greene’s creative direction. In the game, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island and scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill others while avoiding getting killed themselves. The available safe area of the game’s map decreases in size over time, directing surviving players into tighter areas to force encounters. The last player or team standing wins the round.
Battlegrounds was first released for Microsoft Windows in March 2017, with a full release on December 20, 2017. The game was officially launched in September 2018. The same year, a free-to-play mobile version for Android and iOS was released, in addition to a port for the PlayStation 4. Battlegrounds is one of the best-selling and most-played video games of all time, selling over fifty million copies worldwide by June 2018, with over 400 million players worldwide including the mobile version. This game is nothing short of an extreme sport and people prioritizing the game over other studies or other duties is commonplace now.
Statistics as of December 2018 show that PubG Mobile has 200 million monthly players and 30 million daily players (excluding China). 8% of the total players are from India and 33% are from China (October 2018 numbers)
The average amount spent per day on PubG is a whopping 1.1 million dollars. A beginner plays with other beginners and a person’s chances of winning goes up drastically as he starts playing with experts. This ensures that a player’s win-percentage stays high, and he keeps getting the adrenaline rush that the game feeds the players with. The algorithm of the game is such that if a person loses 5 games in a row, he has a chance of winning the next two rounds and his hope of winning continues. How this mobile game negatively affects India’s youth is an urgent subject of research.