Over the weekend, the hugely popular "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG)" was the subject of a massive surge of negative reviews on the PC gaming platform Steam. The reviews appear to be coming from a large number of Chinese players who were not happy about getting advertisements in-game.
Since the game's early access was launched a few months ago, "PUBG" has had mostly positive reviews. However, Steam's histogram feature, which provides statistics for game reviews, indicated that more than 20,000 negative reviews hit the game in just the last few days. The game now has mixed ratings on the gaming client.
The reviews cite the inclusion of in-game advertisements as the reason for the negative rating. The game is advertising a virtual private network (VPN) accelerator in PUBG's lobby screen in China.
Since there are no local servers in China, Chinese players connect to other servers with high ping, which hinders speed of the connection. One way to work around this is to use VPN. The software claims to allow players to connect to foreign servers faster.
Players are not happy with the fact that Bluehole Studios, the team behind "PUBG," is putting advertisements in a game that is not free to play. They are also saying that promoting third party tools instead of simply adding Chinese servers is bad practice.
Other reviews note that the game developers lean heavily toward online game streamers instead of listening to the real community of "PUBG" gamers. In one incident, a streamer called out another player for killing him in the game. Due to this, the game banned the user who killed the streamer due to accusations of stream sniping, wherein a player enters a streamer's game only to kill them in-game.
The banning was met with negative reaction from the community, who says Bluehole Studios should stop catering to streamers and focus and the game's optimization updates and bug fixes.
