A couple of days ago at Gamescom 2017 Bluehole, Inc. developers of the wildly popular Battle Royale style game Playerunknown's Battleground revealed that their game will be published by Microsoft on Xbox One. Playerunknown's Battleground is the first game of its kind to pass the 8 million sold mark on Steam.
The purpose of this publishing deal is for Microsoft to help "accelerate console development" and that even though Microsoft will be supporting the continued development of the title Bluehole, Inc. will still be in charge of the development and maintain complete creative control. When announcing this partnership VP of Bluehole, Inc, Chang Han Kim had the following to say:
Our goal is to deliver the best Battle Royale experience to a global audience and our partnership with Microsoft will allow us to do just that, this partnership with Microsoft will accelerate the development and delivery of PUBG to console players around the world as we utilize their vast resources and impressive technical, sales and marketing expertise.At the moment the plan for Playerunknown's Battleground for Xbox One is that it will release for the Xbox Game Preview Program in late 2017 before the final version will release on all Xbox One devices in early 2018. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox also weighed in on the partnership.
I couldn’t be more excited to be working with the team at Bluehole to bring Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds exclusively to our players on Xbox One this year,We’ve been huge fans since the very earliest days, and worked hard to bring the game successfully to our E3 briefing. The announcement of our publishing the game on console today is an evolution of the strong partnership we’ve been building over many months.PUBG released for steam earlier this year and allows players to drop into an 8km x 8km landscape with no equipment forcing players to loot and take out other players as their playable area gets slowly restricted. For more information, you can head to their Steam page.
What do you think of this partnership between Bluehole and Microsoft? Are you planning on picking up PUBG when it releases on Xbox One? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
