PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Review

Nothing else in 2017 moved the industry this far. Brendan Greene took a mod idea, one hundred players dropped onto an island with a circle closing in, and built the tension engine that every large publisher spent the next three years copying. The genius is scarcity plus geometry. You land with nothing, most fights are decided before a shot is fired by whoever holds the better building and took the quieter approach, and the shrinking play area guarantees that the story ends.

Long stretches are empty, and that emptiness is the point, because it turns the moment a distant engine cuts out into something closer to a horror film than a shooter. The gunplay is heavier and less forgiving than the games it beat, which rewards patience and punishes flailing. The technical state was indefensible for most of the year, with stutter, pop-in, and cheating at scale, and the art direction never rose above functional. None of that stopped it from setting concurrency records nobody had come near. Influence this total is its own kind of achievement.