PUBG competition with other games |Professional competition

To celebrate the game surpassing two million copies sold, Bluehole announced a 2017 Charity Invitational event, inviting 128 players to compete over their official Twitch.tv channel to raise money for the Gamers Outreach Foundation with Bluehole matching all donations up to US$100,000.

 The competition ran in early May 2017, and raised at least US$120,000 from viewers along with Bluehole's US$100,000 match, and served as a prototype for future eSports events for the game.

During the August 2017 Gamescom event, Bluehole and ESL organized the first Battlegrounds invitational tournament, with a $350,000 prize pool. Separate events were held for solo players, two-player teams, two-player teams fixed to first-person perspective, and four-player squads. Each event featured three matches, with the player or team scoring the highest across all three named winners.

Greene said that while he had envisioned the battle royale format to be a spectator sport since his ARMA II mod, their approach to making Battlegrounds an eSport would be a matter of taking "baby steps". Greene said that they would not actively pursue eSports until after the game was fully released and that all major bugs were eliminated. The Gamescom 2017 event demonstrated the issues surrounding the logistics of running a large Battlegrounds tournament with a large number of players involved, and they had worked alongside ESL to explore how to do this effectively in the future. Further, Green stated there was also the need to establish a format for presenting a Battlegrounds match to make it interesting to spectators, which he thought would take some time to develop given the nature of the emergent gameplay, comparing it to established first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arena eSport games.

A 20-team, 80-player tournament produced by Intel took place in Oakland in November 2017, with a prize pool of US$200,000.