PUBG, the game that ignited the battle royale craze, turns 8 years old soon—and I feel ancient

PUBG is about to turn eight years old. That fact gives me a lot of feelings, but one of the biggest is back pain.

It’s really only been eight years since PUBG came out? Eight years since the battle royale phenomenon truly began? PUBG wasn’t the first BR game (H1Z1 comes to mind), but it is the one that truly brought it to the mainstream. Everyone was playing it, streaming it, or making content around it back then, and it felt like it was the biggest thing in the world after it became available in early access on March 23, 2017.

I distinctly remember watching Lirik play PUBG (known then as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) in its earliest of early access periods, and then it launched onto Steam and took over the gaming community. It was a buggy mess that took several substantial updates to fix, but it being the first true BR to the market meant that it kicked in a door that has been open ever since.

Before its initial Steam release, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene used to create mods for games like ArmA 2, which is how BR found its earliest roots. But with PUBG, streamers like Shroud blew up in popularity with their sniper clips, Dr Disrespect started his rise to fame, and Lirik continued to solidify himself as an OG streamer and one of the top creators on the platform. And that, truly, was just the start of what BR was capable of.

A little over six months after PUBG launched and brought BR to gamers the world over, Fortnite: Battle Royale released. And then Realm Royale. And then Call of Duty: Blackout, then Apex Legends, then Call of Duty: Warzone, and countless other BR games. It’s hard to imagine all of these titles coming out if PUBG didn’t explode in popularity back then.

To celebrate PUBG Battlegrounds (its latest official name), update 34.2 is rolling out today, featuring special decorations all across Erangel (the original PUBG map), a new store update, a Survivor Pass, and more, so it may be worth downloading again to check out. But today, I truly feel nostalgic for what the game has done for so many.

Just think about how many careers have been born in the gaming industry from battle royale, and not just streamers like Ninja and so many others, but developers, marketers, and more. We all owe battle royale quite a bit, I think.

And although BR may not be the hot ticket that it once was, it’s still popular, and so is PUBG. Right now as this article is being written, it has the second-highest concurrent player count on Steam behind only Counter-Strike 2, and far ahead of new release Monster Hunter Wilds, with over 900,000 players. Its staying power is something to behold.

Regardless of how you feel, or felt, about PUBG, its lasting cultural impact can’t be denied.