Why one of the best professional gamers in the world terms PUBG “a waste of time”

NEW DELHI: Competitive gaming communities across the world are no strangers to the name of Shroud, who is known for acing games like CS:Go, Call of Duty Black Ops 4: Blackout, PUBG and more titles. Shroud, whose real name is Michael Grzesiek, is one of the biggest streamers on live video streaming platform Twitch. Earlier, Shroud tried his hands on battle royale game Apex Legends and didn’t seem to like it that much. Though he has been playing PUBG for quite some time, he didn’t seem to like that also after playing it after a break and called it “a waste of time”. After returning to PUBG, he faced lagging issues in his first two games. Before his third game, the game suffered again from lag. That happened to be the last straw (technically, the third) to break the camel’s back. He shut the battle royale game down, saying: “I’m not playing this. This is fucking stupid. I don’t even care. I’m not dealing with this shit, it’s a waste of my time.”

Shroud seemed to be disappointed playing Apex Legends, the game that has been in a rage in the battle royale world recently. The game had hit 50 million players in its launch month only. But it didn’t impress Shroud. Interestingly, he went back to playing Apex Legends for the rest of the stream after the PUBG issue. The makers of the Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) game--PUBG Corp-- reported a revenue earning of $920 million in 2018 which translates to approximately Rs 6,363 crore. The company also reported a profit of $310 million or around Rs 2,143 crore during the same time. While PUBG has earned close to $1 billion last year, Apex Legends-- the new kid on the battle royale block-- seems to have seen a beating with a report by content services company Seeking Alpha saying that “both viewership on Twitch and searches on Google declined substantially.” The summary of the report adds, “Popular streamers and influencers are quitting Apex” and “Apex is wildly overvalued for a fading game”.