Fortnite is a massively successful game, but that success came at a price. Its frantic pace of updates keeps players engaged but it also reportedly keeps employees locked in a state of brutal crunch to keep up with the demand for a constant flow of new content. In an interview with PCGamesN, PUBG Corp studio director Brian Corrigan said that the Playerunknown's Battlegrounds team actually took a shot at maintaining a similar pace, but found that it just couldn't keep it up.
"Last fall—and I said this before, publicly—but we were trying for this weekly update cadence. And it was one of those things where a bunch of us were like, look, we want to improve things as fast as possible. There's some stuff that drives us crazy as players, and who's going to fix it? Us! We're the developers, we've got to go fix it, just because we ourselves want to play the fixed version," Corrigan said.
"So we tried to crank out these patches on a weekly cycle last year, and it just really didn't work out. If you've been on this side of game development before, that's a pretty hard pace to keep to. So we slowed it down a little this year, and we've been doing smaller patches every month, and a bigger season schedule."
Corrigan doesn't see that as a problem, though, because he considers PUBG and Fortnite to be very different sorts of games. "We have a more high-intensity competitive game, we've got a functional esports program that we're putting a lot of time into right now," he said.
"If there's pieces [of Fortnite] that work for us, that's great, because we should learn from the best teachers across a lot of different games, but our formula is unique. That's something we understand, and we have to always remember: this PUBG formula is unique, there really is nothing else out there like it."
