PUBG as a game just turned me off mechanically, and the gameplay is merely okay (if not a little boring and waning); I still cannot understand the frothing-at-the-mouth kind of insanity that surrounds it.
I'll explain myself. I played the game religiously for a year and was completely obsessed. This game gets your heart going. The effort and investment into winning a game gives a huge pay off when you finally win one. It's exciting and keeps you at the edge of your seat. Most games don't make me feel that way. Rocket League is the only other game where I would have to take a break and let me heart slow down. Add in the fact that it's a shooter (which I enjoy) the combo just became addicting. I wanted to feel that excitement. PUBG also has proximity chat which creates lots of really funny in game interactions. What other shooter can you tell your enemy to suck it before you kill them with a pan? (yes I know pubg isnt the first game to feature pans, but the voice chat, to me, made the game a lot more fun (you can check out my PUBG trolling videos on youtube
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But you are right about the gameplay and mechanics. They suck. It's not a good shooter, the game is not optimized, and the developers pretty much loaded with money took their time until Fortnite came along to really start improving the game.
Which brings me to fortnite and why its beating PUBG. PUBG made the BR game mode global. People loved the game mode and PUBG gave them their fix, but it's not really a good game in terms of how it was built. It's actually quite shit. But the BR mode made it a hit. Fortnite then took the mode and implemented into a ready game that had the mechanics and gameplay down. Made it free, put it on all platforms, and boom, it blows PUBG out of the water.
And that opened the flood gates for copy cats. But I don't see an issue with it. Most of these titles are going to be game modes, like BF5, COD, RDR.... will all have this mode, but I don't think it takes away from what those games were/are. Adding new full title BR games like Mavericks.... I'm not sure. Ive got to wait and see, it looks like it has potential, but who knows. It's definitely expanding on the BR mode to make it worthy of a full game, but we'll see. To me, that's still expanding the ideas, but trying to hit a gaming area that people are really enjoying. I don't see anything wrong with it.