A few weeks ago I was invited to join the Technode podcast as a guest on an episode about the popularity of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in China. If you aren’t familiar with PUBG, it’s an online survival shooter where you drop onto an island with 99 other players and collect weapons and items to defend yourself and survive to be the last remaining combatant on the island. Over the last year it’s become one of the most popular games in the world, and Tencent (Asia’s largest publicly owned company) secured rights to publish the game in China.
A few interesting facts about PUBG which are discussed in the podcast:
- The game’s development was led by an Irish indie game developer named Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown) who had been living in Brazil, but then moved to South Korea to develop the game with a company called Blue Hole
- As you can imagine, it’s violent. In recent months China has come out and said that it does not adhere to “Socialist principles”. There was conjecture that the game would be banned in China before Tencent acquired publishing rights
- It’s a top game in the US and Europe, as well as China. A single game establishing such a position in and outside of China at the same time is unprecedented.
There’s much more in our conversation, which you can listen to here: