The recent partnership between Bluehole and Tencent looks to be doing more than just bringing Bluehole’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to China on PC. Tencent has announced that it is spearheading an effort to have the popular Battle Royale survival game brought to mobile devices as well.
According to a translation of the company’s announcement, the in-development mobile game is planned as a port of the massively popular PC game and aims to introduce China’s massive (and still expanding) mobile games market to the survival shooter that has already surpassed 21 million copies sold.
The decision to go mobile isn’t entirely surprising; Tencent recently reported a 61 percent year-on-year revenue increase, thanks in no small part to the performance of its smartphone games like Honour of Kings. Between the current and previous fiscal years, Tencent’s smartphone game revenue grew by 84 percent altogether.
However the company didn’t mention if the mobile PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds would eventually release outside of China, only saying that early work on the game is proceeding smoothly.
The partnership between Bluehole and Tencent was announced just last week as part of the developer’s effort to officially bring PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to China. As Bluehole co-founder Chang Byung-gyu had previously noted, releasing a game in China is often difficult as a foreign developer but can be possible with a Chinese partner.
While the game is already unofficially playable in China through Steam, an official release will require the developers to adjust some of the game’s content to align with “socialist core values, Chinese traditional culture, and moral rules.” This would likely be true for the mobile version as well.