Argyrios Emmanouloudis (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Abstract
This paper explores the dynamic, often exploitative, relationship between fan labour and the video game industry, focusing on the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). Using platform and user-generated content theory, it examines how fan contributions, such as fan art and gameplay improvement suggestions, contributed to the game’s rise to a best-seller. By analysing fan comments on message boards and official statements across platforms, the study reveals how companies leverage a “mega-platform” structure: a central platform supported by satellite channels that foster fan engagement. While fans experience community strengthening, companies profit significantly from their unpaid labour. This research highlights the dual impact of fan labour—enriching the gaming community while exposing the lack of fair remuneration for contributors. It adds to the discourse on platform dynamics, labour exploitation, and community-building in the gaming world, emphasising the symbiotic yet exploitative nature of the fan community-industry relationship.
1. Introduction
Breaking into the video game industry is not a simple task, and it can take a good deal of effort for a fan to become part of the business. Even then, they might not reach the desired recognition and level of monetary rewards. Sometimes, individuals are required to tweak the system in some way and play by new rules. That is the case to be discussed in this paper, namely PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [hereafter: PUBG].
PUBG is an online video game themed around survival in a remote location, in which the player must eliminate every opponent and become the last person standing. The game was released in 2017, and it quickly became one of the best-selling games of all time, earning high revenues for its makers. PUBG’s roots in the modding and DIY cultures make it a significant case to examine. What began as a one-man project has massively impacted the video game industry and has been supported by a large online community. What makes PUBG interesting is the fact that a big part of its success is due to labour undertaken by community members.
The research question of this paper will, thus, be “how influential fan labour can be for fan-based gaming projects, such as PUBG, and how can these projects use platforms to expand their growth?” As I will attempt to show here, the game’s success would not have been as great had it not been for the labour undertaken by community members on various platforms.
2. On Platforms
In The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, José van Dijck claims that users are entities who play numerous roles: they can be recipients, producers, consumers and much more (2013). Importantly, where usage is concerned, Van Dijck also makes a distinction between implicit and explicit participation, with implicit participation referring to the technological infrastructure of a platform, whereas explicit participation refers to the way users interact with it (2013).
Unlike single platforms, online fan communities do not function on just one exclusive platform. Online fans have an interconnected system that itself is constitutive of a platform, such as a community’s website that will have served as the community’s core and which links to other platforms or social media (Deller, 2016), thus creating what one could call a “mega-platform.” While all platforms could be studied separately, the fact that they are all part of a “dynamic infrastructure that shapes and is shaped by culture at large” should not be overlooked (Van Dijck, 2013: 43-44). David B Nieborg and Thomas Poell make a similar observation when they discuss multisided markets and how these markets bring together multiple factors that shape production and distribution in cultural industries (2018). Given this, I would argue that platform analysis may be used to examine the various components (platforms) that support communities as if the components were part of a mega-platform that binds fans together. For Poell et al., platforms are “(re)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalised interactions among end-users and complementors, organised through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetisation, and circulation of data” (2019, p. 3). This is the definition of the platform to which I will subscribe to in this article. Now, it is important to see how the PUBG game was created and what its ties to user-generated content are.
3. From “Playerunknown” to “Playerwell-Known”
While living in Brazil, Brendan Greene, known online as PlayerUnknown, took notice of DayZ, a modification, also referred to as mod, for the game ARMA 2. Mods refer to adjustments to the elements of a game, either in a minor or major manner, usually requiring some programming knoweledge. Greene quickly found himself engrossed in the mod, and, inspired by his love for the Japanese film Battle Royale (Kinji, 2000), he put his limited programming skills to use and worked on his own project. In 2013, he released his own self-made mod for DayZ. That version of the mod became renowned in the online gaming scene. In 2016, Chang-han Kim of the Bluehole Ginno Games studio hired Greene and gave him all the resources he required to make his vision a reality. The outcome was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. PUBG was released in the beginning of 2017, and by 2019 it had sold over 60 million copies, while it also received various award nominations, as it became one of the most streamed, followed, and played video games of all time (Bailey, 2019; Gough, 2020a).
PUBG began as a form of cultural resistance seen as a video game fan’s hobby. It later changed the creator’s life and had a significant impact on the video game industry. Moreover, while it economically impacted the video game landscape, PUBG also made an impact on community shaping and development. Fans increasingly had their attention drawn to the made artefact and were subsequently inspired to participate, and often, to create their own artefacts. In the following section, I will discuss the importance of modding in the video game industry, followed by the characteristics of the PUBG community that allowed for its prominence.
4. Why is Modding Important?
At this point, I also believe it is important to explain where the modding scene fits into my argument, and why it is essential to bear modding in mind when discussing interaction between the gaming industry and its fan base.
Modding as a practice is integral in the video game industry and has changed how labour is perceived in it (Postigo, 2010; Sihvonen, 2011; Unger, 2012). David B. Nieborg has argued that the video game industry originated from modification activities (2005) and links his argument to the early days of entertainment software, and some of the first games developed by American university students who tampered with the software and hardware available to them (Kline et al., 2003). The video game industry did not follow the same course in every country, but without those early steps in the labs of universities and government facilities things would have been at least somewhat different. Modding is still a popular activity and, typically, community members will welcome newcomers and help them with questions they may have, even though it has been noted that sometimes the feedback systems in different modding communities can lead to an exhausting work rate (Hong and Chen, 2013).
Various contemporary games, including Stardew Valley and Minecraft, have seen multiple modifications made for them: from simple tweaks to total conversions. At the same time, modding helps maintain interest in older releases, and games such as Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (first released in 1999) and Grand Theft Auto IV (first released in 2008) continue to receive mods developed for them to this day.1 Modding has become significant enough to be understood by industry as being important for boosting game sales; and the complaining that ensues whenever games do not support modding opportunities is also understood (Hong and Chen, 2013).
Modding has been considered a motivating force in socialisation around video games (Crawford and Rutter, 2007; Sihvonen, 2011). This notion is supported by the fact that modding goes beyond the act of simple engagement with the game, and it is based on the collaboration of people in a network. Modding activities bring people together in a borderless, online domain, enabling fans to create artefacts together with fellow gaming fans whom they may never even encounter offline. In this regard, modding communities may also be described and understood as imagined communities, and as akin, at least in some respects, to the Maussian notion of the gift economy in terms of social bonding (Mauss, 1966).
In addition, modding presents its participants with opportunities for resistance, which may be both encouraged and commercially exploited (Raessens, 2005). In this regard, I would agree with Hong (2013) that modding is a process that embraces romanticism as well as neoliberalism. That said, however, I would also argue that the neoliberal practices, and particularly the exploitation and zero or scant remuneration involved in modding, very probably outweigh the romanticism that goes into their making.
Entertainment industries regularly claim all ownership of their trademarks, although they allow for fair, non-monetised use of them by fans. It is also one of the core beliefs of the modding community that mod artefacts should be distributed free of charge. Therefore, it would be difficult to find recognised cases of fan exploitation stemming from malicious intent in this community. This, however, begs the question of the ultimate fairness of business practice and what constitutes fan exploitation. For example, it is difficult to believe that every fan of the game is aware of the legalities surrounding content ownership and distribution. Additionally, fans often are content makers and provide input in many forms as a means of improving their entertainment experience; therefore, it could be argued that, in some cases, exploitation may be a matter of perspective or an implicit contract between parties. Regardless of the fans’ beliefs, I maintain that labourious fan activities that have economic value for a company alone, contain traces of exploitation since the company profits while the fan gains only sentimental or emotional value in return.2
5. Dataset and Methodology
I visited the official PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds website in May 2020, during which time I also started following the community more closely on various social media platforms, especially Reddit. For this research, it was mostly the Reddit comments that were taken into consideration, due to the platform’s allowance for lengthy posts, visiting for at least two months, and collecting the top five daily posts. The comments were noted down and used to come up with various themes, per content analysis guidelines (Schreier, 2013). To get a better understanding of how the community assembles and functions, I also logged in daily, between June 2020 and July 2020, on PUBG Mobile, the official mobile version of the game. It is worth noting that after those initial visits, I repeated my steps in September 2024, without discovering significant differences. Hence, my methodology features elements taken from content (Schreier, 2013) and platform analysis (Van Dijck 2013), enhanced by personal observation.
Since my research is about communities of video game fans but not about their gameplay per se, I will examine the tools that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has used to form a community, rather than devoting much discussion to the game itself. While the game does allow for direct communication among group members, the game’s content will not be of concern here, given that elements of gameplay are not always or necessarily of importance to a study of the community around it. The comments will add clarity when it comes to the affordances of participation that the PUBG community employs.
The three main themes located by analysing the platforms that the community uses and the Reddit comments are accessibility, community engagement, and struggle for control.
6. An Accessible Battleground
Participation in a PUBG community or sub-community is indeed open, easy, and free. Members can join anytime one of the various channels such as a Reddit thread or a Facebook group. That said, however, fans need not participate in one of these channels, in order to belong to the fandom surrounding PUBG. They can participate as passers-by, or by reading through comments or watching videos and live streams of others playing the game. The game, however, is not free.3 In other words, while gaining access to the game requires payment, participation in the community can remain open, easy, and free.
Importantly, by spectating or playing, communal evaluation takes place, and its significance for the corporation is unquestionable. The feedback constantly provided by the fans and supplied free of charge to the company has developed the community. The game changes and gets updated and improved, and so does the community around it. As long as there is new game content produced, the community has something to discuss and evaluate. In addition, all fan-made content is also constantly evaluated by other fans on the online platforms.
In specific cases around video game fandom, such as the PUBG fandom, another participatory activity derives from exceptional individual action. Following the release of a new game, early adopters showcase the game for other people, usually by using streaming platforms while also possibly still playing older games and therefore also occasionally contributing to the game’s popularity and reception. Members of the PUBG community who are also streamers—according to Greene—have played an important role in the rise of the game’s popularity (BBC Radio 1, 2018) and, subsequently, in the rise of the community itself. In fact, in early 2018, when the game was gaining in popularity, there were over 70 thousand viewers watching PUBG streams (Gough, 2020b). PUBG now acknowledges the labour undertaken by the streamers through the game’s menu where a list appears of selected streams that players can choose to watch. In this way, the parties involved (for example, PUBG Corporation, streaming services, and fans) maintain a connection. While the company that made the featured game has the most to gain, in a few cases streamers have built entire careers by playing games (Johnson and Woodcock, 2019, p. 672).
However, there is another case that may well be linked to more obvious or easily defined exploitation, worthy of discussion here. Around the holiday season of 2017, Microsoft posted an advertisement on X for the Xbox One X console release of PUBG. The advertisement was almost identical to a fan-made poster for the game that was posted on Reddit, by a fan going by the name of Macsterr. Numerous members of the PUBG community voiced their displeasure online, which prompted a Microsoft spokesperson to make a public statement in which the company claimed to be unaware of the similarity between the fan art and their advertisement and stated that they would investigate the matter further (Tassi, 2018). The advertisement was taken down and, although this has never been officially stated, it may be safe to assume that the company chose to avoid presumed culpability. This example suggests that—as a means of increasing profits—a major corporation may have initially seen fit to neglect to give credit to a fan for fan-made artefact until pressured to do so.
A community clustered around a best-selling, constantly updated game may also be characterised as an unfinished process (Bruns, 2013), whereby fans offer their input and voice their opinions, knowing that their community thrives and expands on such input. Even communities formed around a game series on a hiatus may continue to thrive, just like games with millions of followers around the world. As the game keeps evolving, so does its community, not only in terms of play but also in terms of communication, content creation and distribution. Games are constantly in progress, using valuable feedback from their fan base since “video game players interact with games through contributing content and modifying gaming conditions” (Kim, 2014, p. 357). Specifically, PUBG has had over 30 update patches since the day of its release. Therefore, the game is never finished. It is constantly improved, while gaining additional content, fixes, and updates, just like the community that shapes and interacts around it.
One might well expect that for a gamer to climb through the rankings of a PUBG community group, good gameplay skills would be required, and this would be true if competitiveness were the focus. Despite this being a community grown around a video game, various types of productivity contribute to the strengthening of communal bonds. For example, the winners of a fan art contest held by the PUBG Corporation had their work featured on the company’s website, and their status as fans elevated. Fans may then participate by playing, through message board discussions, or by creating content, which rarely receives any significant compensation.
However, because PUBG is a popular competitive game, there are also inherent systems based on partial meritocracy and heterarchy around publicity endeavours, like those Bruns would have described (2013). Some popular streamers such as JackFrags and Anthony_Kongphan became popular online by streaming PUBG and creating the desire to see more in the fan base. Fans also use platforms such as Discord and Reddit as a means of organising themselves and recruiting others for their sub-communities. On various PUBG threads on Reddit, people are constantly looking for professional players or content makers to join their ranks and help them in their goal of gaining notoriety on the global PUBG scene, either as competitors or content makers. Furthermore, as previously noted. Brendan Greene has commented that, by following the gaming scene, he would like to provide a young person with the same opportunity to make their vision an actual game that he enjoyed (Batchelor, 2017). Yet, any fan who climbs through the ranks of the hierarchy and enters the video game industry system will most likely do so within the conditions that a company allows.
Like any kind of fan content, PUBG’s fan content is decommissioned fan labour, harvested from a dedicated community, without monetary remuneration. PUBG managers are well aware of fans’ desire to create and unite through content, therefore they have posted guidelines on the official PUBG website regarding content created by players. According to these guidelines, anything PUBG-related created by community members is classified as player-created content. PUBG Corporation encourages fans to make this content, while stipulating that it must be free of charge to the company and other players. If content is submitted to PUBG Corporation, it remains entirely their property (PUBG, 2024). In this way, communal property technically exists in the PUBG community but not as the free and uninterrupted ownership of content that theorists such as Axel Bruns (2013) would have envisioned. This is because the community operates under specific rules set by the official corporation of the game, which acts as a supervising body.
Along with the communal property aspect of the game, there is a very interesting feature that separates PUBG from other fan communities: access to the official data of the game (API key) offered to the fans. This means that—if granted access—anyone can build a website or an application using in-game data and the interface of PUBG. In this way, a fan can make tools that help and guide newer PUBG players.
Where the creation of tools and PUBG is concerned, Brendan Greene is aware of the importance of fans’ feedback, with the in-game item, the pan, being a prime example of that. During PUBG gameplay, players may encounter a pan that can be used both as a melee weapon and as protection. This is a reference to the aforementioned Battle Royale movie, and the team of developers forgot to remove it when the game became available. When Greene and his team saw numerous online postings about the pan and its popularity among fans, they decided to keep the pan in the game (Bratt, 2017).
7. Community Engagement in Pubg
As I have explained in this section, PUBG progressed very rapidly from its beginnings, entering the franchise phase and eliminating light monetisation tactics for higher profits. PUBG is supported by a sizeable community that continues to play the game, create content, and discuss it. At the same time, the team behind the game uses available technology to maximise profits by constantly advertising the game, as well as the benefits of joining the community, which one does by purchasing the game. Multiple users create fan-made content which primarily references the game, hence most of the users participating in the creative process are also fans and players of the game. These fans connect through channels promoted by PUBG Corporation and, since they are monitored, make their fan content traceable. Fans also connect through grassroots initiatives, although there are fewer of them.
Although the community is free and easy to join, purchasing the game should be considered the main point of entry into the community, even though some fans do not pay for the game and still participate by spectating or playing the free version. Fans offer valuable feedback for the community’s development and longevity, while creating content, which the company encourages, and which content is “irrevocably assigned to PUBG Corporation, together with all intellectual property rights therein” (2024) as stated in the official guidelines found in the PUBG website. The PUBG community contains various kinds of fans, with the limits being quite flexible: someone might try the game and become a fan or enthusiast who buys additional content for the game. Some of these fans might even become makers and produce content for the community. There are also streams, promotions, or fan art contests and the like, which allow for fluidity between categories. For some, this participation can be enough, as, often, fans seek recognition from the brand as a reward instead of monetary gain (Goggin, 2018). However, a company might refuse to acknowledge fan creations, while owning unremunerated fan creations outright and permanently, thus stirring up controversy. In fact, as the example of Macsterr’s art appropriation above has shown, when there is an attempt to exploit fan art by an external party the community may unite to fend it off.
Thus far, I have described how the PUBG community has formed and co-existed in its relationship with PUBG Corporation. I would now like to list a few more observations I made with regard to PUBG Corporation’s power over the community, and its relationship with the fan base that supports the game.
8. Struggle for Control
It is difficult to pinpoint the subjective experience and perspective of fans themselves where other community members and administrators are concerned. However, it has been reported that players of PUBG generally feel happy when interacting with other players, and they believe that the game operators protect the interests of the players (Xu et al., 2018). I would suggest that, apart from the development team’s efforts, labour from this international community in the form of fan participation and feedback has contributed enormously to the PUBG community’s growth. Indeed, even from the game’s testing period, fans were very eager to share the word and participate in tests aimed at developing a better finished product.
That said however, not everyone would concur that the relationship between game and fans is entirely felicitous, and, indeed, the second most upvoted thread of all time on PUBG’s subreddit—at the time of writing—is a complaint. The user who posted it, Ford117, is upset that fans have supported the game from the beginning, yet the game remains full of glitches, cheaters, and additional paid content. The user describes the situation as a “damn shame” and goes on to explain that they believe the community has been heard, and that community members want the game to succeed (2018). An article in Metro (Beckwith, 2020) likewise criticises the developers’ lack of attention to specific issues, while also noting a drop in the number of active players. The public outing of game errors and call for change demonstrate how mass demand can pressure a company and possibly achieve a desired result. Even when the demand concerns fan-made content as is the case here in PUBG, feedback in the form of mass demand is a seminal element of the fan community and allows for interaction between makers and followers.
Players’ feedback being taken into consideration, as in the example of the pan described above, illustrates that the PUBG Corporation is indeed serious about community management. And, as might be expected, the PUBG Corporation endorses the use of social media in order to communicate with the community’s members, while also contributing to connections made in the community. However, whatever Greene’s feelings toward the community may be, his project has become enormously successful, and his current field of action is also limited as a consequence because PUBG and its community are bound by set rules by corporate policy, commercial limitations, and other external factors. Now that Greene no longer maintains exclusive control over the PUBG game and has other priorities, he is not always available to hear fans’ concerns.4 When a project grows and becomes highly profitable, communication with the upper levels of administration is faceless, and the company becomes focused on heavily monetised activities and promotional endeavours.
9. Conclusions
As mentioned above, three main themes were located when it comes to thinking of fan participation and labour in the PUBG community: accessibility, community engagement, and struggle for control on the mega-platform. On PUBG’s release, fans used all available platforms to offer input and create their own artefacts for circulation in various fan circles, with the goal not only of suggesting improvements for the game but also of advertising it. At the same time, the company provided specific, and usually monitored, access to creative tools for the fans, and the fans have expressed themselves and contributed to the growth of the community – a strategy which is greatly beneficial to the company. The fans do not seem bothered, presumably because they also get a product that conforms to at least some of their demands. It may therefore be argued that, through the creation of their own fan-made artefacts, fans have helped create an even greater artefact, namely the PUBG game. And finally, I believe that a large community like the one under discussion here is analogous to other kinds of communities. I would, therefore, expect that what happens with PUBG in terms of communal osmosis could also happen in other communities of similar origins and content.
Moreover, PUBG seems to be a perfect manifestation of the industry’s tendency to appropriate fan content and profit from it. In this case, a fan created a following around their work, elevated themselves to a leader and, in what initially appeared to be a moment of empowerment, joined the industry. At the same time, the industry made use of all available materials on a mega-platform of interconnected social media to foster a lively community that would provide content by labouring playfully towards the community’s strengthening together with the industry’s prosperity. It could be claimed, however, that the industry invariably gets the biggest piece of the pie.
10. Limitations And Further Research
This research looked at specific platforms on specific time periods. A look at the same or other platforms could potentially produce additional results and following the community for a longer time might enrich the results further, especially given the fact that some institutions are engaging into “deplatformization” strategies (Van Dijck et al., 2023). Interviews of prominent community members, especially those who labour frequently, could also highlight more aspects. Moreover, other communities, either less or more popular, should be worth investigating, since not all fan communities enjoy the same relationship with the video game industry. The community under examination here also (mainly) uses the English language, but there are instances that indicate the existence of different perceptions of language and, possibly, culture: PUBG players from specific ethnic backgrounds form alliances and use cultural-specific symbols to express their identity. Research investigating how fans from non-English speaking backgrounds or fans who do not self-identify as cis male, straight, and white, participate in fandoms has the potential to unveil lesser-known areas of fan cultures. E-Sports are also worthy of further investigation as they might also produce important data about player-to-player and player-to-industry interaction.
End notes
1. Although the current mods are being released for the higher-definition remakes of the game, the Age of Empires II modding scene has been very active since the original game came out.
2. Outside of the video game sector, I would not consider volunteer activities that contribute to the well-being of a community (a soup kitchen, for example) as exploitative. In addition, many creative workers, such as illustrators or designers, might do free work for reasons including building a portfolio, helping an NGO, or for barter.
3. A free mobile version of the game exists, which is not entirely different from the paid one.
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Ludography
Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, Ensemble Studios, USA, 1999.
ARMA 2, Bohemia Interactive, Czech Republic, 2009.
Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar North, USA, 2008.
H1Z1, Daybreak Game Company, USA, 2015.
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PUBG Mobile. iOS version, PUBG Corporation, South Korea, 2018.
Authors’ Info
Argyrios Emmanouloudis
Erasmus University Rotterdam,
emmanouloudis@eshcc.eur.nl
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.