The gameplay wasn't novel in PUBG. Battle Royale games (mostly from the same Brendan Greene) were a thing for years before that, and they were massively popular, enough to set the hype train running. The only relatively novel thing compared to the previous games was their solution to the teaming issue, as they separated solo and team modes.
What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.
And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.
What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.
And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.
PUBG was iterative, it didn't happen overnight.