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Microsoft will be the publisher of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds when it comes to Xbox

Microsoft will be the publisher of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds when it comes to Xbox

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The company will provide developer Bluehole with more resources

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Photo: Bluehole

We’ve know since E3 that the hugely popular survival shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is coming to Xbox One later this year as a timed exclusive. But “PlayerUnknown” himself, game designer Brendan Greene, says Microsoft Studios is now the official publisher of the console version of the game. That means Greene and his development team at Korean studio Bluehole now have the added resources of the Xbox maker itself, which should certainly help with speeding up development and helping the team hit its 2017 release target.

For those unaware, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG for short, is a competitive shooter in which 100 players parachute onto a deserted island, loot the ruins of abandoned cities and towns, and face off in a massive land war until only one player or one team of players remains. The game is still only in beta on PC, and yet Greene revealed today that PUBG has sold a staggering 8 million copies since March of 2017, when it was first released on Steam’s early access program.

While we don’t have a concrete release date for the Xbox One version, or any news at all about a future for the game on PlayStation, we do know that Microsoft now has an added stake in the game’s success on console. It’s unclear if there involve any revenue sharing now that Microsoft is PUBG’s publisher, but we can assume it will get triple-A treatment from Microsoft considering it’s one of the few standout exclusives for the Xbox platform going into the holidays.