There’s no denying that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) is one of 2017’s hottest games on PC, topping Dota 2 records for most concurrent players on Steam and selling well into eight figures worth of copies, despite still being in early access on the PC platform. And now Xbox and the game’s developers have revealed its Xbox launch plans.
In a stream from Paris Games Week, Chang Han Kim, CEO of PUBG Corp, Brendan Greene (a.k.a. PlayerUnknown) and Aaron Greenberg, General Manager of Xbox games marketing, finally gave PUBG a release date: December 12th, 2017.
PUBG will launch into the Xbox Game Preview Program, essentially recognition that it is not a finished product and that bugs should be expected, but it lets players get their hands on a hotly-anticipated game before it hits a version good enough for an official launch. Anyone who buys the game during its preview phase will still own the game when it launches properly.
While the stated goal is for version parity between Xbox and PC, when PUBG launches through the Xbox Game Preview Program they will not be on the same version, with slight differences. Meanwhile, the PC version is on track to hit its “version 1.0” milestone – a launch-ready version no longer part of Steam’s early access – in late December.
During the livestream from Paris, it was confirmed that when launching in preview on Xbox, there will be support for HDR and Xbox One X enhancements, while 4K textures are scheduled for later on their development roadmap.
And, of course, no game announcement is complete without the developers mentioning the cosmetic items that will be on offer: “exclusively” available to Xbox players will be the PUBG Warrior Pack, the PUBG Accessory Pack and the PUBG Tracksuit Pack. According to the release on the Xbox Wire, those three items will be the only purchasable cosmetic items during the game’s preview phase.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will come to Xbox One as part of the Xbox Game Preview Program on December 12, 2017, for $29.99/€29.99, and pre-orders are already available.