The team are fresh from putting on an invitational event, raising $220,000 for charity Gamers Outreach. "We really wanted to do an invitational because raising money for charity is something I've done with Battle Royale since I started the game mode in the Arma series." said Greene. "We wanted to put on just to show off the game in a competitive setting."
The event came together in a little under three weeks. "It was really funny," said Greene, "people were telling us, "Oh, the spectator camera is crap." Stuff like this and all these kind of lovely comments that you get in Twitch chat, but they didn't realise the camera didn't exist three weeks ago, that they (Bluehole) kind of put everything that you saw in the invitational together in about three weeks."
Regardless of the push to get the game match-ready, Greene says that for he and the Bluehole team, esports isn't a priority.
"We really truly believe that for any esport to form around Battle Royale, the game, number one, has to be stable, it has to be competitive and we have so much research and work to do to get it to that state."
The team aren't going to be pushing esports just yet, because Battle Royale will need work to become a viable esport product. However, they've hired Chris 'Panky' Pankhurst as the team's esports product manager. "It's not to start doing esports straightaway but more for him to start planning, start figuring out what we actually need from the game for it to be a successful esport." said Greene "We're not jumping headlong into esports. We really want to make sure that we've got a great platform first and make sure we do everything in small steps so we're not rushing into it."
Esports might be a far off destination, but Greene and Bluehole are already preparing for the journey. The Battle Royale genre does need some adjustments made to make it as competitive as it could be: many people have been critical of the RNG element to the game.
"Hearthstone is RNG based too, right?" said Greene with a laugh. "So, we're trying to do things to kind of reduce the RNG and you can see that in the game.
"If Battle Royale really was super RNG then you wouldn't have people at the top of the leaderboards but players that play the game that are consistently good because they know the right strategies to play during the game, how to play the game to win. While it is RNG, it's RNG with limits."
"We're working hard to ensure that there's good loot balance across the island. Yes, there will be certain areas that will be more high risk to go to to get better weapons, but you'll still be able to find those better weapons in low value loot areas, just the way the system's set up. So I believe Battle Royale can be an esport, but we just have to tune it a little bit just to reduce that RNG, because with 100 players, yes, the RNG can really play a part but if we take the player count down to maybe 64 players, it reduces less of the RNG because you can choose when to jump from the plane so you don't have to get into a fight straight away."
