Chinese Players Review-Bomb PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

It’s all because of those pesky ads!

Well, maybe the gaming community overreacted a bit on this one, but PUBG has recently been hit with a flood of bad reviews on Steam. Specifically, Chinese players posted negative reviews on its Steam page due to in-game ads. Apparently, the ads are only visible during loading screens, and they concern a third-party VPN service. The service promises to improve the internet connections of thousands of Chinese players. This is particularly relevant when they’re trying to connect to non-Asian servers. However, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds now has more than 26 thousand negative reviews. The bulk was submitted from September 29th onwards.

Will this affect the game’s popularity?

It’s hard to tell at this point. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has received praise for its engaging gameplay, original concept, and graphics. The game managed to sell around 10 million copies, and it boasted a very high number of concurrent players (1,645,460). For now, the ads in question seem to target Chinese players exclusively. Moreover, it’s not likely that these ads will appear for other languages, especially given this aggressive response. At the end of the day, ads can be annoying, but they are sometimes necessary in order to ensure the survival of certain services. Still, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is not a free game. It costs about $30 at the time of writing, and given its impressive sales, the developers don’t really need ads in order to make a living.

The game’s review rating has gone down to 6/10 on Steam.