This story is one about the Early Access game that is taking the gaming world by storm PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLE GORUNDS and their announcement to push back the addition of 1st Person server options, FOV slider for 1st person and a new rifle until August 3rd 2017 and the addition of crates due to release on the same day. There will be three crates added to the game Wanderer Crate, Survivor Crate and the Gamescom Invitational Crate. The Wanderer Crate and the Survivor Crate can be opened with Battle Points (BP), there is no cost announced at the time of writing, but the Gamescom Invitational Crate can only be opened with a key you can buy for $2.50 each. The proceeds from the sale will be used for providing funds needed to organize the event, provide a prize pool for the invitational winners and support a selection of charities. Here is a link to the entire post on the Steam discussions page.

Now for my thoughts on the matter. First of all there seems to be many people outraged at this because at an earlier point in development the developers explicitly said there would be no micro transactions until the game was released from Early Access. Below is video evidence of this.

While it is understandable that customers are upset because they felt lied to and betrayed I can only really sympathize with them a little bit. At the end of the day this is a game studio in the business of making money. They see an opportunity to make money and they are going to take it. This feels like more of yet another example of why consumers should not be buying Early Access games. Things change for good or for worse in the course of a games development cycle and while it’s unfortunate and extremely disappointing that yet another developer has ended up lying to its customers it just reinforces this idea that we should not be buying unfinished games. One might claim we should be mad at the developers for lying to them but that boat has sailed, they already have our money and no amount of complaining will realistically change anything. If it does I’ll be sure to let you know.

Now you may be thinking that that is my biggest complaint or gripe with this news about loot crates being added to an unfinished game to fund a tournament for said unfinished game. That’s where you would be wrong. See my actual biggest issue with this whole thing is the idea that they are trying to fund a tournament around a completely unfinished, un-optimized and buggy game. While I’ve held off giving my impressions of the game thus far, I’m waiting for the FOV slider to be added because frankly the game gives me headaches, I find it quite preposterous that a game in this state should be having any form of a tournament. When I think of a tournament I tend to think of skill based games such as chess or a sporting event where the rules are predetermined and everything works as intended and it’s a fair competition. None of these criteria other then rules being known before hand actually apply for the GAMESCOM PUBG INVITATIONAL. There is a huge amount of RNG in this game meaning you could lose instantly depending on where you drop and the houses you raid. Next there is issues with lag and game optimization that affect the outcome of matches. Less people mean better experience as I experienced in the test server and this is felt when the server is full. These issue are game breaking and severely limit the fairness of a game trying to have a tournament with prizes to win. This is my biggest issue with the crate system, how the money is being used. If it all went to a charity then I may have less of an issue with it but there is no explanation for the money split so we realistically have no idea how it’s going to be divided.

Time will tell how this key and crate system turns out but my biggest fear is it turns into CSGO or TF2 crate marketplace and let us be realistic here, I highly doubt the developers would mind to much if that is the final outcome. While that may not be what the player base wants in the long term, it may just be the way things are heading for PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS.