PUBG is becoming an esport, whether it's ready or not

At Gamescom two weeks ago, Playerunknown Battlegrounds’ developer Bluehole Studio partnered with esports giant ESL to host the PUBG Invitational, the first official LAN tournament for Battlegrounds esports, and the de facto ribbon-cutting ceremony for a brand new esports division. There were 80 pro players on the official guestlist, plus another 20 amateurs determined by an onsite qualifier, all competing for modest five-figure payouts (and gilded chicken-pot trophies).

Battlegrounds’ success is unprecedented. Over this past weekend, the game cracked one million concurrent players on Steam, ousting the perennial kingpin Dota 2. In August, Battlegrounds started to routinely claim the top spot on Twitch — something that’s never happened since the unassailable League of Legends rose to power.

Despite all this, when I reached Bluehole vice president Dr. Chang Han Kim before the tournament to discuss it, he sounded stressed. The Bluehole team has months of bug squashing and netcode optimization ahead of it, after all, and a fully-functioning in-game broadcasting rig isn't its first priority.

In an ideal world, Bluehole could take time to finish development before staring down the proverbial esports barrel, but the demands are stacking up. Esports titans like Team SoloMid, Cloud9 and Team Liquid are already inking expensive pro Battlegrounds teams to their brands — essentially treating the game like a fully-operational product before the release date has even been announced.

Chang, for his part, says he feels like he’s losing ground.

"Our product is not finished," he says, beaming through a Skype call from his office on an early Seoul morning. "It’s not complete. It’s not ready for serious competition. We need more time to polish the game, and we’re still in Early Access. People still want to play competitively, and that puts pressure on us."

A Battlegrounds esports scene is something many at Bluehole wanted from the moment they started development; the team just didn’t expect it to be happening so soon. Months ago, when I profiled Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene shortly after the game became available on Steam, he spoke about his dream of a studio full of 100 players illuminated by bright studio lights, each of them being eliminated one by one and forced to take a long lonely walk off the stage until a sole survivor remained. The word Greene used was "spectacle." He wants to hoist the brutal, free-for-all mayhem of dystopian action flicks like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games into reality.

Establishing an esports framework with the scope Greene talked about can take months, or even years, though. For example, Blizzard first announced the global Overwatch League last November. Since then it's courted elite sports brokers like Robert Kraft and Stan Kroenke, and the date for the season opener has still not been announced.

Bluehole has a lot of that commissionership work ahead of it, but it also has to answer the fundamental question of what Battlegrounds will look like as an esport. 19 teams competed in the squad portion of the PUBG Invitational. That adds up to 72 players, all on one map, all during one game. How do you tabulate the scoreboard? How do you make sure the prize payouts are fair? How do you punish turtling and camping?

"If you look at professional esports, it’s usually one team vs. the other. But this is different. We need 100 players," says Chang. "We need a good format, but we don’t have it set up yet so we definitely need more time. Other esports have a global league or a certain model, and we still need to come up ideas and plans that will fit our game. Nothing is ready. But teams are gathering."

Betting big

Team Elevate makes its living by buying in early. The venerable esports organization fields squads in a number of eclectic shooters — Rainbow Six: Siege, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — as well as the third-person MOBA Smite. Battlegrounds is new, fresh and unregulated, which makes it a natural fit for Elevate's business model. "We like to put our flag in the dirt. In case the scene does work out we’d like to have an advantage," says Collin Ruud, chief brand officer of the company. "We saw PUBG get incredibly popular very quickly, and once the developers indicated that they were open to esports we knew we definitely wanted to get on board if we could."

On July 22, Elevate hired a PUBG team of no-name players pulled from the community tournament circuit. That made it one of the first organizations to double-down on Bluehole. Ruud understands there is risk in doing so — Elevate did this exact same thing with H1Z1 (Battlegrounds’ spiritual precursor) a year ago, only to watch that scene slowly wither away. But, he says, if you’re not comfortable with these kinds of hedges, you’re in the wrong business.

For many, esports is a speculative industry, especially when you’re in deep with an unknown quantity. Some organizations are rich enough to poach a great League of Legends team overnight and immediately have a highly competitive squad in a supremely lucrative sector, but Elevate isn’t blessed with that kind of cash.

"I’m not gonna mince words here,” says Ruud. “Elevate doesn’t have a private investor. We don’t have any venture capital funding or anything like that. And as such, our budgets are more limited than some of the much larger organizations out there. So that sets us up so our pitch to sponsors and potential investors is, ‘Look at our ability to map a course when a new esport comes out to find the best team, to field the best team, and to create the best media around that. … That sets us apart as an organization."

One of Elevate’s rivals is Noble Esports, a franchise founded in 2014 by an entrepreneur who goes by "Recon." He can recall dozens of times where Elevate and Noble have found themselves butting heads in the same game; he says it’s a symptom of the comparable size of their organizations. Like Elevate, Noble survives by wagering on unproven titles in hopes that they’ll be there to reap the rewards if and when they bloom. Unsurprisingly, it put some of its capital in Battlegrounds quite early. May 12, to be exact, long before the PUBG Invitational was in its embryonic state.

"We’re in the same boat [as Elevate]," says Recon. "Noble is privately funded by me, 100 percent. So this was something we’ve done a million times. We have gotten into larger games. We’ve had League of Legends. We’ve had Counter-Strike. But all esports organizations that aren’t VC-funded look at spaces that they can get into to get visibility and notoriety and attract sponsors."

Despite the upside, everyone understands that laying professional hopes on a game in Early Access is a gamble.

Ultimately, though, that’s the economic reality of this industry. Esports is a feeding frenzy, and latching onto a title like Battlegrounds is just another means of survival. There are plenty of horror stories about esports companies drying up overnight, just like there’s plenty of triumphs of companies getting rich off the right players and the right game.

Of course, there are some organizations out there who can afford to toe the line. Team SoloMid is one of the biggest and most successful companies in the business — valued at $27 million in 2015. Its financial advantage let it buy into the Battlegrounds scene with a "pro team" made up of Twitch streamers Colton "Viss" Visser, Austin "SmaK" Haggett, Gary "BreaK" Marshall and Marius "aimPR" Ionita. These four already had significant social followings across multiple platforms, which means they’re already making money for the TSM brand. It remains to be seen if they’ll be great players competitively, but that’s not what Andy Dinh, CEO of Team SoloMid, is worried about right now.

"It’s hard to tell where PUBG is going to go competitively. [The Invitational] is the first tournament, so we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves," he says. "We don’t even know if there’s gonna be a competitive league, or if there will be a tournament every few months or so.”

TSM’s more measured, personality-driven approach has caught the ire of other organizations in the space, though. The PUBG Invitational recruited some of the most prominent teams in the game, as well as a handful of miscellaneous influencers. Team SoloMid, with its starpower, was on that guestlist. Elevate was not. While Ruud understands that the esports business routinely emphasizes recognizability over pure, nuts-and-bolts talent — especially in adolescent scenes without a centralized tournament authority — he believes Elevate’s investment into a group of consummate professionals will pay off in the end.

"What got us excited about [our] group is that they were not about anything but winning, and in a sport that’s growing like PUBG is, that’s really important," says Ruud. "They’re always practicing, always working on ranks. So, as opposed to a team like TSM who put together a team of streamers and are reaping the benefits of that now … it is what it is, but we certainly want teams that are going to win at LAN events. … A couple of [our PUBG guys] already have competitive or semi-pro experience, so they know how the game works; they know that this is essentially a full-time job."

And now it's a thing

A few weeks before the PUBG Invitational, Dinh said he expected "a ton of things to go wrong,” which he considers to be a normal part of the maturation process for any esport.

He was right.

Viewers complained about the less-than-comprehensive camerawork during some matches (keeping track of the drama between dozens of players on an 8x8 kilometer island can be difficult). There was also a confusing championship victory for a player who got ahead on points in the second round and spent the rest of the tournament refusing to engage, which ended up being enough to secure a first place finish. But many assume those are just growing pains. Dinh is confident that Bluehole will tweak things to make the pro PUBG experience better for the audience in the future. "We’re really in the phase where we’re just excited,” he says. “And things will change for the better."

Still, will those growing pains pay off? Nothing is guaranteed in esports, and throughout the conversations with multiple people in the scene for this story, I kept coming back to a single, crucial question. Battlegrounds is a game where things are left up to chance. You can bust down the doors of a shed and find an anemic arsenal of weapons — suddenly under-gunned and under-armored while high-tailing it for the safe zone. The player didn’t make a tactical error; they just chose the wrong door and now they’re out of luck.

That is, of course, part of the fun. Getting screwed is a crucial part of the Battlegrounds experience, which is something that clashes with the traditional esports model. In Call of Duty and Counter-Strike, teams memorize the wrinkles of map geometry down to the pixel to gain a split-second edge. If you were trying to make a living in esports, wouldn’t you want to be in control of your own fate?

"A lot of people in our company [have] said, ‘If we are ever to become an esport we’ll need to decrease the number of random elements,’ but I don’t think that’s true,” says Chang. "I watched professional Counter-Strike tournaments and it’s very optimized. Teams want the optimal strategy. And to me it's like watching table tennis. It’s very fast-paced — there’s like an equation to it.

"I believe there could be a different kind of competitive shooter. … Players that adapt to random elements and survive to the end; that shows that they have the skills. … Having something that can be determined beforehand and be calculated — I don’t think that’s an element of true skill. I think it actually decreases the joy of watching competitive games. For sports you need drama. You need underdogs creating drama."

Brendan Greene’s pet comparison for Battlegrounds is poker, or more specifically, the belief that even a seven-deuce can be dangerous if you play it right. There is a satisfaction in outmaneuvering winning when you’re up against the wall, and that’s exactly what drew in Dakota "Shraded" Freelon, who now plays for Elevate’s Battlegrounds team. Like most rubberstamped pros, Shraded had a background in rote, conventional shooters like SOCOM and Call of Duty before taking a flyer on PUBG shortly after release. He hasn’t been able to put it down since, and describes it as "his new World of Warcraft."

"Me and my team have been discussing this question. We have one team member who’s like 'I don’t know if this is going to be an esport,' and the rest of us are like 'how could it not be?'" says Shraded. "I think this game just breeds that aspect. You have to be better. If you win, that means you’ve dominated 100 other players. … In Call of Duty you beat a team of four. OK, who cares? [In Battlegrounds] you’re in one game, and if your name keeps coming up in the killfeed, there’s 99 other players who are just like, 'Who is this guy?'"

"A lot of people like to claim ’we didn’t win because of [randomness],’ but there is so much equipment you can use — flashbangs, grenades, smoke — that help you make it less [random]," he says. "I think that’s the best part about [Battlegrounds]."

For years, the number one thing most esports have tested is a player’s twitchiness. Quake’s 1v1 dueling, League of Legends’ skillshots, Counter-Strike’s extremely demanding learning curve. Battlegrounds is similar, but it also evaluates a player’s guile, resourcefulness and willingness to risk the end of their tournament by scouting the cabin on the hill. Those are the things that distinguish the game from every other shooter on the market, and for the pros staking their claim early, it’s a feeling worth fighting for.

Taking all this into account, I asked Chang if he thinks organizations should pump the breaks on Battlegrounds esports. Does he find the speed of things to be dangerous? Is he in need of a few quiet nights? He laughs a callow laugh before giving his answer.

"There’s pressure because there’s this huge need, and we can’t take full responsibility and fulfill their needs," he says. "But they have their freedom to do whatever they want; it’s not for us to decide."

There are hundreds of publishers who’d beg to have Bluehole’s problem right now. The drive to actualize a Battlegrounds professional scene comes directly from the community, because clearly, the community feels something here that it's been in search of for a long time. As long as that remains in place, the sky’s the limit.