PUBG Review Bombed After Chinese In-Game Ads

PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS has recently broken the record for concurrent players on Steam with a tally of 1.5 million users. The developers, Bluehole Studio, have been humble about their success, attributing it to good timing and iteration of existing ideas. Despite this positive press, there are some who have an issue with Bluehole's financial decisions. Specifically, fans in the Chinese market.

Chinese players have complained of lag-affected local servers, forcing them to join European or North American games. On top of this, they've also reported in-game advertising for an 'accelerator' VPN service claiming to boost connections to international servers. The issue they have with this, specifically, is being advertised to inside a game that isn't free-to-play. Instead of Bluehole doing more to support their Chinese servers, they say that they're promoting an advertisement of a tool used to better access foreign servers. They see it as taking advantage of paying players.

This has, for better or for worse, affected PUBG's Steam reviews pretty drastically. almost 10,000 negative reviews have been posted to the game's Steam page.

Bluehole has not commented on the situation as of yet, but being an indie developer reliant upon a dedicated fanbase, a quick response would not be entirely surprising.