ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Tencent has snapped up exclusive publishing rights to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in China

Tencent has snapped up exclusive publishing rights to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in China

And it's official - Tencent has revealed it has the exclusive rights to publisher Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in China.

VentureBeat reports that the Chinese tech and entertainment megacorporation will be running official Chinese servers and will focus on complying with the region's notoriously tough regulations. The firm has also said it will deal with cheaters.

In October, China's content regulator denied a licence for the game in the country due to it "deviating" from the region's moral and cultural core. Tencent will certainly be able to help in this process.

In the region of 35 per cent of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds' players are from China due to Steam's existence in the region in something of a grey area. With Tencent's WeGame coming to the fore, it remains to be seen whether Valve's storefront remains in China.

This comes after almost a year of courting and flirtation between the two companies. The news that Tencent had attempted to buy a stake in developer Bluehole earlier in the year.

The news that Tencent would be publishing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in the region was outed by Bluehole exec Chang Byung-gyu earlier this month as part of a Korea Times piece on the company's financials and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds' success. The article says that Tencent might still end up owning Bluehole and PUBG Corp given the potential windfall for shareholders.

The title has sold 20m copies since March - as of the start of November - meaning sales are probably closer to 24m by now.

We caught up with creative director Brendan Greene last week, in which he said that he did not feel any ownership over the battle royale genre that he has popularised with PUBG.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.