Last week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds broke 1.5 million concurrent users, announced its own subsidiary company (PUBG Corp), and revealed Squad FPP OCE servers will be confirmed "after mid-October". But the battle royale megahit rounded off the last seven days with a slew of negative Steam reviews. Why? In-game advertisement of a third-party gaming VPN in China.
Despite being fully-localised, Chinese players complain of lag-affected local servers and are often forced to join European or North American games. Conversely, native players in these forums report migrant players bring their own lag and can be at times unplayable.
Chinese players have now reported in-game advertising for an 'accelerator' VPN service said to boost connections to international servers. The problem for these players is twofold: they feel that in-game advertising for a game that isn't free-to-play is a problem in itself; and that Bluehole could do more to support their servers as opposed to promoting the advertisement of tools used to better access foreign ones.
The result of this unrest has seen almost 10,000 negative reviews posted to the PUBG Steam page in the last day—as outlined here:
We've reached out to Bluehole about the situation and will report back as and when they reply.
