PUBG hits 17m sales, could be banned in China

PlayerUnknown's game doesn't sync with Chinese cultural values.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds sailed past 17 million sales on Steam this week, but according to reports it may not be released in China, a potentially huge market for Bluehole's game, in anything like the immediate future.

That's because the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association has said in a statement, picked up on by Bloomberg, that PUBG "deviates from the values of socialism and is deemed harmful to young consumers," to use the news organization's phrasing.

Bloomberg noted that the association had consulted with the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television prior to its statement, which means PUBG is highly unlikely to receive an official licence.

"This basically spells the death sentence for PUBG in China," said Benjamin Wu, a Shanghai-based analyst.

Still, PUBG will probably thrive even without one of the world's largest markets. Its 17m sales make it comfortably the most successful western game of the year, and it hasn't even made landfall on console yet, with an Xbox One version hopefully still due out in the next two months, and Bluehole apparently in talks with Sony about a possible PS4 version.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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