TL;DR: Here's 7 more games that are like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds:
- DayZ: Battle Royale and PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale
- H1Z1: King of the Kill
- The Culling
- Unturned: Arena Mode
- Rust: Battle Royale
- Ark: Survival of the Fittest
DayZ: Battle Royale and PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale
Interested in seeing where it all started? Before Brendan Greene was making bank on Battlegrounds, he was known as the lead designer on DayZ: Battle Royale, an Arma 2 mod for the popular open-world survival mod DayZ. After DayZ went standalone in December 2013, Greene began work on PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, an Arma 3 mod that launched on the Steam Workshop in 2015. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is the culmination of Greene’s ideas for his work on mods like this, and later his consulting on H1Z1, but if you’re interested in testing out the origins of his most popular work, DayZ: Battle Royale and PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale are where you should start.
H1Z1: King of the Kill
Daybreak Game Company’s H1Z1 actually split off into two separate game projects in 2016, becoming H1Z1: Just Survive and H1Z1: King of the Kill. The multiplayer zombie survival version, Just Survive, is comparable to DayZ with a larger emphasis on team-building. If you’re looking for battle royale-style deathmatch action, King of the Kill is what you want. Players parachute onto land, find weapons, and try to survive against others within the boundaries of a noxious green fog. While the mind behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds worked as a consultant on H1Z1, many Battlegrounds fans describe H1Z1 as more “arcade-y” than tactical. H1Z1’s accessibility is partially a result of this “arcadiness,” but there are other accessible, “Arma-lite” style survival games if you’re looking for something more realistic.The Culling
The Culling is on a much smaller scale than Battlegrounds, with only 16 players battling it out for victory. Its 8-player Lightning Mode offers even quicker matches. Unlike Battlegrounds, The Culling features a crafting system, perks, the ability to set traps, and a much wider range of melee weapons. Its dystopian game show theme makes for a much wilder style than the fairly grounded Battlegrounds and even the typical zombie apocalypse of H1Z1. While this one’s been on Steam Early Access since March of last year, developer Xaviant is bringing The Culling to Xbox One’s Game Preview program in June.Unturned: Arena Mode
One of the most popular games on Steam (the 5th most owned in the United States, according to Steamspy) is Unturned, a free to play online sandbox with a zombie apocalypse theme. Unturned features survival-based single- and multiplayer modes that let players team up, build bases, and collect supplies to fight hunger, thirst, disease, and zombies. Its Arena Mode bears the closest resemblance to games like Battlegrounds, where several players randomly spawn on a map and fight until one person or team is left standing. But unlike the other games on this list, Unturned completely eschews a realistic, military sim style in favor of a more blocky, low poly look reminiscent of Minecraft.
Rust: Battle Royale
Rust, the popular multiplayer survival game from Facepunch Studios, has a few servers running an unofficial game mode called Rust: Battle Royale. It starts you out naked, with nothing but a rock to defend yourself with, then follows the usual flow of gathering loot within a gradually constricting arena and killing off other players until just one is still alive. Unlike Battlegrounds, Rust: Battle Royale does allow you to form unofficial alliances mid-game without risking a ban, but the likelihood of that happening seems slim — especially since the game rules don’t accommodate for more than one winner. At least, not yet.