PUBG developer admits problems with game and vows to fix it, as Fortnite popularity continues to grow

'We’ve fallen short'

The developers of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds have "fallen short", they have admitted.

The frank admission of the game's problems comes as the battle royale genre comes to be dominated by rival game Fortnite. That game has quickly become the most popular in the world, while PUBG has been plagued by player complaints about performance and communication.

Now the team behind the game have recognised those problems and promised to fix them.

"Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways," the team wrote in what it said was the first of many 'developer letters' from the team to fans. "Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game."

Those changes will primarily revolve around cheating and performance issues, the team said.

It will also change the way those fixes are sent out to players. At the moment, updates arrive with each major version of the game – but from now, fixes and upgrades will be passed to users as soon as they are ready.

The performance changes being promised are vast, but they mostly involve simplifying and speeding up the way the game processes changes. For instance, at the moment when vehicles are driving around they cause a huge amount of alterations to the game's world, all of which have to be processed by the computers of players, which then slow down.

It will also continue to make changes to keep ridding the game of cheats – a problem so prevalent that it has led to arrests and legal cases. It said that it had banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for cheating and that new changes meant that cheaters were usually banned within hours of starting.

While sharing the new fixes, developers also detailed new updates and features coming to the game. Chief among them is the introduction of the east-Asian themed Sanhok map – which they said will arrive on PC at the end of June.

Most of the new changes detailed by PUBG developers are meant for the PC. Updates have been slower to arrive on other platforms such as the Xbox, which just received a new desert map called Miramar that had been on the PC for some time.