Bluehole and Tencent in talks over potential Battlegrounds publishing deal

Bluehole co-founder Chang Byung-gyu says that the developer has been in ongoing talks with Tencent over a partnership that would see its record-breaking battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds released in China.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Chang disclosed that the Chinese internet giant Tencent had reached out to Bluehole, seeking a publishing agreement for a Chinese release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and offering to purchase equity in the company.

Though the talks have yet to yield an agreement, Chang says the conversation is promising and that Tencent could be an important partner for the developer, especially given the difficulty of bringing a game to China as a foreign studio.

In its roughly six months of life, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has sold over 10 million copies and made a habit of regularly Steam records in the process. After not-so-slowly creeping its way up the most concurrent players list on Steam, Battlegrounds finally dethroned Valve’s own Dota 2 as the most concurrently played game on Steam with 1.3 million players. That bar has since been raised to over 1.5 million concurrent players.

The Early Access game is currently slated to make its console debut on the Xbox One, though it isn’t likely to remain an Xbox exclusive for long. The company is currently discussing its arrival on PlayStation 4 with Sony, though it seems the terms of that arrangement have yet to be set in stone. As noted by Bloomberg, Bluehole has also forged a publishing deal with the Korean company Kakao Games.