For the past year or so, we’ve been intently covering the PUBG saga. First, it was the must play game that no one could put down. Then it was a game of the year contender. Then the Fortnite rival. But then Fortnite and other battle royales continued to get better and PUBG stayed the same. Now it’s the game that most people expect to die sooner or later at the hands of Epic and the evergrowing battle royale space.

So what happened? How did the game go from a must-have to a soon-to-be relic?

The primary blame has to be shouldered by Bluehole and PUBG Corporation, the developers of the game. PUBG is simply too glitchy, too buggy and too unreliable.

As an early release, those problems where tolerated and even embraced by the community. But the game has sold nearly 35 million copies across multiple platforms and the 1.0 has been out for almost six months. That means the developers should have had plenty of time and resources to produce an acceptably polished game. Not a perfect one, just one that wasn’t constantly flawed.

The problem is, even if PUBG was the perfect version of itself, that still might not have been good enough. While the blame has to start with the developers, the biggest problem for PUBG is its competition.

Epic simply made a better battle royale. Whether they copied PUBG or created Fortnite under some shady pretenses is another discussion entirely. The thing that matters is that Fortnite is superior to PUBG is most meaningful ways.

If driving and realistic graphics are your thing, then maybe PUBG is still the right choice for you. If not, then Fortnite is the logical choice (and that’s coming from someone who isn’t a fan of Fortnite and who used to like PUBG).

Fortnite has a bigger community, better support, more customizations, more to do in general, less bugs and a building aspect that makes it wholly unique in its genre.

The sad thing is, Fortnite and PUBG could have probably coexisted. The games are different enough so that their audiences don’t entirely overlap. Plenty of gamers left PUBG for Fortnite, Ninja being the most influential of them all, but plenty more just left PUBG in general. If PUBG could have just retained the players who left for reasons other than Fortnite, then we likely wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.

Of course, PUBG isn’t dead just yet. There’s still hope that Bluehole and PUBG Corp. could turn things around; but it feels like things are coming to an untimely end.

One of the reasons PUBG had such early success was because it was unique. There were only a handful of battle royales out there it was pretty unique among them.

Now the battle royale market is set to become one of the most saturated in the gaming industry. Seemingly everyone is planning new battle royale modes for their upcoming games, including Call of Duty. And the battle royale mode in Black Ops 4 (called Blackout) is set to have callbacks to the entire series, including the original Modern Warfare.

That means come October, PUBG will be competing not only with Fortnite, but also with the massive nostalgia that is Call of Duty and whatever other battle royales get announced at E3 next week.

It’s not over for PUBG yet, but it’ll take a colossal effort and more than a little luck for the once dominant game to return to glory.