PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds Gets Review Bombed Following In-Game Ads

When you're the new alpha dog and you're flaunting your stuff, it's not all fun and games. You might have run of the place, but everyone (and I mean everyone) will be looking for some excuse to bring you down. Case in point: Pewdiepie. There are dozens upon dozens of young white men on YouTube who carelessly throw around the N-word and make Nazi jokes, but since Mr. Die is on the top, he gets all the flack. And in games, when you're PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and current king of Steam, it means something as silly as in-game ads can get you over 10,000 negative reviews over the span of a Sunday.

Here's the story: PUBG is playable all around the world and is even localized for its Chinese audience. The problem is that the servers for the Chinese players are quite far away, so, inevitably, they suffer a great deal of lag. A fairly standard problem and not a game-killer, I suppose. The real problem is that starting on Sunday, Chinese players started spying in-game ads for an "accelerator" VPN that promised to improve game performance.

Two problems: the first is that Chinese players are, just in general, not very happy about seeing in-game ads in their paid, 30-buck game. But what's even worse is that it's an ad for an issue that the studio should be trying to fix for free. You can see why that might be seen as a slap in the face for the Chinese consumers.

And the Steam page has taken the hit poorly. The game has dropped to a "mixed" score, the bad reviews from the Chinese mixing with the continued anger for the "Stream Sniping" controversy that, by the way, was never really resolved. Now, this won't stop the game from continuing to sell well and garner larger audiences, but it's a problem nonetheless... especially if the studio opts out of actually taking care of the issue.

We'll have to see.