PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for Xbox One to be published by Microsoft

Microsoft will publish the Xbox One version of Bluehole’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the company announced.

The game, which is available in Early Access now for PC, will launch via Xbox Game Preview in late 2017. Partnering with Microsoft will allow Bluehole to accelerate console development, as well as grant them access to “vast sales, marketing and publishing resources.”

Get the full message from Bluehole vice president Chang Han Kim below.

Hello Xbox fans!

I’m CH Kim, Executive Producer of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and VP at Bluehole. It is my pleasure to announce some exciting news for the Xbox player community around the world.

I have been working in the games industry developing online titles for 17 years now and have always wanted to develop a Battle Royale game. In 2016, after I was finishing up an MMORPG, I was given a chance to start a new project, so I decided to try something different and create the Battle Royale game that I always wanted to make.

While I was preparing for the project, I stumbled upon a guy calling himself PlayerUnknown – who we all know now as Brendan Greene – whom at that time was running Battle Royale mods on top of other games. I contacted Brendan right away and was glad to bring him into our project.

I have always thought that Battle Royale had an enormous potential in gaming, so I moved quickly to bring the standalone game that solely focuses on Battle Royale gameplay – an experience that I believed gamers wanted. The project started humbly with only 40 people on the team. We started from scratch and communicated closely with our community from a very early stage, receiving lots of user feedback during a pre-alpha, and two alpha tests in 2016. In March this year, we launched PUBG into Steam’s Early Access and have continued to evolve our game ever since.

We pride ourselves on creating the first truly standalone Battle Royale game. The game’s premise is simple, you are put into an island with 99 other strangers who compete with each other to scavenge for weapons and items in order to become the last man standing. The game mechanics are simple and intuitive, which made our game easy to dive into and fun to watch. We will continue evolving PUBG with our community so that it lives up to the attention it is getting, and we hope you will join us

Back in June at E3, we announced that PUBG will be launching exclusively on Xbox One in the Xbox Game Preview program in late 2017. Ever since then we have come to realize that we have a shared vision for the direction of the game with the Xbox team. This led to our decision on extending our partnership with Microsoft and I’m happy to announce it now includes Microsoft as the publisher for our PUBG on Xbox One.

By partnering with Microsoft, our team believes that we will be able to accelerate console development, while maintaining quality across all platforms, as well as giving us access to vast sales, marketing and publishing resources that will help us reach new fans to welcome to the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds universe.

We are excited to continue and further strengthen our partnership with Microsoft and are super excited to meet the Xbox community. We will be launching exclusively on Xbox One in the Xbox Game Preview program later this year and we can’t wait to see all the Xbox fans on the battlefield.