PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds stormed the Steam charts in 2017, as battle royale games sought to establish their place amongst the most popular games in the industry.
PUBG, as it is commonly known, have thus far led the pack for battle royale esports, hosting some of the biggest organisations in esports alongside big prize pools. However, according to PUBG Corporation CEO Chang Han Kim, it doesn’t stop there.
In a recent interview with Inven Global, Kim said that a movie is something he would like to see happen.
“I’d like PUBG to become a universal media franchise based on the game. We want to take part in diverse industries including esports, movies, drama, cartoons, animation, and more,” Kim said. “In fact, we received a couple of love calls from a number of developers in Hollywood and Netflix. Our dream is to build a new game-based culture through various ways like this, and have the lead of that culture.”
PUBG wouldn’t be the first game to attempt to move in to Hollywood; an Assassins Creed movie was released in 2016 and Resident Evil has a storied and successful history on the big screen. However, many games that are adapted for other mediums often don’t see such success, and this is a challenge that PUBG Corporation would have to address and seek to avoid in the case of a movie.
Ironically, the game itself was initially based on mods inspired by 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, though the game has evolved in such a way that we shouldn’t expect too many similarities between the two.
What PUBG does already have going for it is that hundreds of thousands of people are already enjoying watching it as well as millions playing it, which no game-adapted film has had the luxury of in the past. Should a PUBG movie manifest itself, it would be interesting to see how fans react to their favourite game on an alternative platform.
Esports Insider says: Given the poor reception of films adapted from games in the past, it’s easy to be apprehensive about this idea. PUBG continues to break steam records and is popular all over the world. With Tencent involvement as well, the sky’s the limit and it’ll be interesting to see what they do next. Most PUBG players would arguably still rather the company focused on improving their smash-hit game, though.
