PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds 'guaranteed' to leave Early Access by October

The meteoric rise of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been staggering. Alongside a host of pre-release updates, the MMO battle royale recently hit four million sales in just three months—a feat all the more impressive given its Early Access status. Yet, despite the numbers, there remains a large chunk of prospective players who won't pick up Bluehole's runaway hit till it's launched in full. 

Which is fair enough. The question is, then: when can we expect PUBG's final release?

According to its Steam Early Access blurb, Brendan Greene—aka PlayerUnknown himself—suggests he and his team "don't expect Early Access to last longer than six months." In an interview with RPS at Rezzed earlier this year, one week following the game's EA launch, Greene was however far more forthright. 

"Game development is hard. What makes it hard is, we work with Unreal, which is a joy because they have a company that is focused on making an engine," he says. "So there’s 40 people just working on code for the engine. You look at Daybreak and Bohemia, they’re working on their own engines, and that’s just infinitely harder. I think the ForgeLight engine is a ten year old engine. Now, they’ve improved it considerably since then, but it’s the same with the Arma engine, it’s 15 years old. Now DayZ are making a new engine, and that’s just something which takes time.

"It’s something a lot of people don’t understand and they get a lot of hate because of that. I just try to correct them whenever I can. It’s like, listen, guys, they will get finished. Companies are not going to abandon games like that, you know? People say, ‘oh, DayZ will never be finished,’ and of course it will. People tell us we’re not going to be out of early access in six months; challenge accepted. I can guarantee you, six or seven months and we’re out of early access. It’s the team. It’s a matter of honour, you know? We will finish this game in six months."

Which would see PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds launched in full before the end of October, assuming all goes to plan.