As someone who plays a lot of battle royale games, I was interested in looking at why some may have been more successful than others. One thought that specifically stood out to me was the rapid fall of PUBG (at least in my friend group). I wanted to investigate more on whether this was true of a larger population, and look at the market of battle royale games at large and see if there were certain characteristics that performed better in the market than others, that perhaps PUBG could take advantage of.

**Note:

Because of time and project constraints, we had to source our own survey participants and as a result I do not believe our sample was representative of the true user base for PUBG or battle royales in general. As a result, it would be best not to use the results that came from this project, however, I believe this is a useful exercise to show the quantitative data methodologies and concepts I am comfortable using if we had more resources to get a representative sample. These constraints and limitations on our sample include the following:

• Small sample size: We only had 50 respondents, only 36% of users had played PUBG as well as another BR

• Sample Composition: consists of homogeneous demographic that is not representative of the battle royale population at large: 

  • overwhelmingly college-aged males attending the University of Michigan

  • casual gamers (<5 times a week and <5 hrs a week)

• Self-reported data: Respondents may not have accurately responded to each question since filling out the form was part of a course requirement

Since this was a class project unaffiliated with PUBG, the impact/outcome of this research were recommendations. Again, I probably would not send this to PUBG to implement given our data constraints and sample bias, but these are the recommendations I would have produced given the results our team got from this set of data.

Recommendations:

In order to retain, engage, and attract players, we suggest the following recommendations for PUBG.

Immediate:

• Fix Infrastructure

  • Prevent hacking through ML algorithms

  • Invest in resolving technical glitches and server connection issues

• Offer customization options

  • Continue to expand customization options 

  • Focus more on weapons and abilities

Short-term:

• Increase Pace

  • Speed up the beginning of the game

  • Decrease the map size

  • Increase the rate at which the survival zone narrows

• Improve Graphics

  • Modify the style to match target customer preference

  • Allow multiple options for screen rendering

Long-term:

• Enhance social features

  • Simplify chat room feature and make it easier for gamers to talk to each other

  • Integrate social apps (e.g. Fortnite adding HouseParty integration)

• Encourage trials

  • Offer limited time rewards for players to play PUBG for at least few times

  • Build cross-platform integration capabilities

My Role in this Project

During this project, I was responsible for survey creation and helped distribute it along with my teammates. As a team we split work on the background research, competitive analysis, generating the decision problems, research questions, analyzing the data through Qualtrics, and writing for the main takeaways and conclusions for our research questions.

Introduction

The purpose of this project was to see how to improve players’ experience with a product through market research, involving a survey and quantitative analysis. We chose PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) as our product, a battle royale game published and developed by South Korean company Bluehole. PUBG is one of the best-selling and most-played video games of all time.

Market Opportunity

We chose PUBG since we saw that despite the surge in popularity for the battle royale genre, PUBG’s number of players and viewers have rapidly declined over the past two years. As a result, we saw that PUBG needs to quickly respond in an increasingly competitive BR industry. This presented a market opportunity for us to frame our decision problem below.

Decision Problem:

“How can PUBG enhance the customer experience to attract and retain more players?”

Research Questions:

To answer our decision problem, we wanted to uncover the motivations for players and satisfaction ratings for specific game features in PUBG compared to other battle royales. As a result, we came up with the following research questions:

1. Why do users play battle royale games like PUBG?

2. How satisfied are players with PUBG and other battle royale games overall?

3. Which features do users consider most important in battle royale games?

4. How satisfied are players with PUBG game features compared to other battle royales (including Warzone, Fortnite, and Apex Legends)

5. Which aspects of PUBG are most disruptive to user experience?

Methods - Survey

Next, we created a survey to help us address the research problems we identified above. A large portion of the survey consisted of Likert Scale questions on the importance and satisfaction of players on game features in PUBG and other battle royales. These features were identified through a competitive analysis of PUBG and three battle royale competitors (Fortnite, Warzone, Apex Legends).

I lead the survey question development and creation on Qualtrics, and we sent it out to our classmates (part of course requirement) as well as any of our friends who played battle royales.

We received 66 responses*:

• 50 had played at least one battle royale

• 62% had played PUBG

• 36% had played PUBG and at least one other battle royale

*we want to note that our sample was predominantly college-aged males - again, we sourced our own respondents on a short time frame so majority came from other students at the University, which we do not expect to be representative of the user base of battle royales at large.

Data Analysis and Results

Next, we used built in functions on the Qualtrics platform to come up with conclusions for each of our research questions.

Why do users play battle royales?

How satisfied are players with PUBG and other battle royale games overall?

Which features do users consider most important in battle royale games?

Conclusion:

Variety of Weapons/Abilities, Pacing, Cross-platform integration, and Graphics are the most important features.

How satisfied are players with PUBG game features compared to other battle royales (including Warzone, Fortnite, and Apex Legends)?

Conclusion:

PUBG lags behind other battle royales in Pacing, Cross-platform integration, and Graphics.

Which features impact overall satisfaction?

Using factor analysis, we identified 4 distinct factors from our 13 original features. Next, we used regression to see if any of our four factors had a significant relationship with overall satisfaction.

Which aspects of PUBG are most disruptive to user experience?