It did start off as an indie project by a team of modders from the DayZ platform. Look how it blossomed into. It is owned by a publisher and it runs on Unreal 4 so they haven't really done alot of proprietary tech.
I don't know much about the business model of PUBG, but one always needs to look at the units sold / Ongoing subscriptions.
PUBG mobile has what? 75+ million users according to Wikipedia? (chinese registrations only) And the PC/XBOX version has at least 30millions +.
So that's 105millions players making like 2.5 billions. - So a multiple of ~50 towards CIG ; if you'd divide that 2.5 billions => 2.5 / 50 = you'll end up with 0.05 billions or better 50 millions.
Though you can even find numbers of PUBG having a supposed userbase of 400+ million (
https://successpixel.com/pubg-wiki-income-pubg-business-model/ ) and 100+ million active users (compared to what? 0.2 million for CIG ?).
So now the PUBG numbers seem to be accumulated sales, not yearly ongoing, right?
IF so, you'll see that CIG has already surpassed that by quite a margin.
Now for ongoing spending:
https://sensortower.com/blog/pubg-mobile-revenue-march-2019So monthly something like 50 millions. Again with an active userbase of something like 360 millions installs (factor 144 towards SC's 2.5 millions) => 50 / 155 = 0.3 millions $. And please remember if we take the lower average which looks to be something around 30 millions, it would look even more off.
So even if you think it possible, you gotta ask if CIGs SC is in any way comparable. Because either they're even more exagerating than anyone things, or they're different fruits so to say.
And i'm personally not claiming anything about the CIG released numbers, other than that we've never seen full accounts of the company and especially not audited ones and that we therefore should be careful claiming anything.
