The massive growth of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in China seems to have halted at the end of 2017.

As spotted by the SteamSpy Twitter account (below), at the start of December the game had just below ten million users in the region, but this growth has halted from that point onwards.

SteamSpy speculates that users are waiting for a localised version of the game after tech and entertainment giant Tencent picked up the rights to publish the game in the region. The research firm also postulates that users in China are waiting for a free-to-play version of the battle royale giant.

Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad has also said that nine million people have pre-registered for the Chinese version. He adds that between the PC release and the two mobile versions that Tencent is releasing, there's an audience of over 75m people in the region waiting for the official versions of the battle royale behemoth to drop.

The official Tencent PC version has more than 9 million users pre registered.

Tencent is also planning to release two mobile games.

Overall there is more than 75 million pre registered users in China waiting for these games.

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) January 31, 2018

Roughly 40 per cent of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds user base on PC is from China. Across PC and Xbox One, the title has more than 30m users.