"Fellow game developers must be scratching their heads wondering how such a half-baked game can be so unbelievably popular."
For some unbelievably stupid reason people keep defending PUBG saying that they don't care that it looks a decade old and performs worse than some of the best looking modern games.
From the server to the client, everything is so badly optimised that it ruins the gaming experience.
I'm not defending PUBG here, I want to make that clear, What I'm doing though is explaining an issue the whole industry has.
PUBG is fun to play, entertaining and has sold so well (despite all the issues) because it's new, came up with a good idea for a game mode and isn't the easiest thing in the world, it doesn't have a corridor you walk down, it doesn't have a massive arrow you just follow, you can kill anyone from any angle, it's pretty awesome compared to 99% of what most AAA developers come up with these days.
That's why so many people bought it and defend it, not because it's the most polished game, because everything else is the same boring corridor with some bad guys you fire at or is made so you can barely ever lose or die. And games that are decent (Battlefront 2 is actually a good game) is ruined by Loot Boxes and Pay-to-Win schemes.