Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is a PC game on Steam which has quickly become the hottest thing since sliced bread. If you’ve never played it, the basic format of the game is 100 random players get dropped on an island, loot guns and other items, and the fight to the death. It’s a genre known as “battle royale," and while a bunch of games have tried similar things, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (or PUBG for short) does just about everything right. In English, the closest thing to PUBG is probably Guns Royale (Free), but in China a game titled 荒野行动 which translates roughly to “Wilderness Survival" has stolen the top spots from Arena of Valor– A massive feat, considering Arena of Valor is so huge that it has drawn the ire of the Chinese government.
Here’s what 荒野行动 looks like in action:
It’s baffling how much of the game is blatantly copied directly from PUBG, from how the plane works to how the island looks, there’s even red zones you need to avoid. Normally we’d just write this off as yet another weirdo App Store knock-off, but this game is published by NetEase which is one of the largest Chinese mobile game companies. It also happens to be available on the US App Store, although the game is entirely in Chinese. However, if you’ve played PUBG, once you figure out how the menus and other things work it’s not too difficult to piece the rest together.
What a weird world we live in.