Bluehole built PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ for livestream viewers

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a mammoth success on Steam as well as broadcasting services like Twitch and YouTube, and the Bluehole studio built it specifically for that audience of live-video viewers. Woonghee Cho, Bluehole’s global buisness boss, explained to GamesBeat that the studio set out from the beginning to design its last-man-standing shooter with broadcasting in mind.

That has worked so far. At any one time, tens of thousands of people are watching PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds livestreams on Twitch. That doesn’t include broadcasting sites that are popular in places like China or South Korea. And appealing to that audience has also led to financial success, with sales of more than 4 million copies worldwide. Cho credited a lot of that to the game’s watchability, and he went so far as to call livestreaming audiences Bluehole’s most important customers.