The official Twitter account for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds makes occasional posts about coming updates and features for the wildly popular battle royale game, but most of the past few weeks have seen daily posts about server issues and how the team is working to address them. So yes, they know that PUBG’s infrastructure has been troublesome.
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Today, they’ve issued an apology addressing those problems, and spoken on what’s caused them. You might call this one of those humble brags, but it seems PUBG is a victim of its own success.
“We anticipated about 1 million concurrent users in the beginning of our Early Access period and that is when our lobby server was initially designed,” says the team’s statement. “Since the end of June, our concurrent player base saw a rapid increase so we started designing a new server architecture. However, the number of users increased faster than our development speed which resulted in more connection and server issues recently.”
Part of that rapid expansion has been the game’s massive reception since debuting in China, and those Asian servers have had especially profound trouble keeping up with demand. A huge backlash manifested in Steam reviews around the problem, especially around claims that Chinese players were seeing in-game ads for a VPN service that would let them connect to European and North American servers.
Though the statement doesn’t address the VPN issue, it does say their solutions for players in China were rushed and premature. “Recently, the number of concurrent players in Asia has rapidly increased and there were times the cloud service we’ve been using could not provide more physical servers. To address this problem, we added servers from another cloud service without sufficient testing. Some servers overloaded, which caused frequent crashes. Our development team is investigating the issue in order to prevent it from happening in the future.”
Issues like this are part of why PUBG’s team has been expanding, to the point where they’ve spun out into a new subsidiary of Bluehole. “Our team will not be content with the status quo and will do our best to improve your experience,” they say. “Thank you for your patience and understanding.”