For the last few months, the early-access PC shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has taken the gaming world by storm. Since March of this year, the unfinished yet unreasonably fun Battle Royale-inspired game has gone from a relative novelty to the most-played game on Steam, dethroning the likes of Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—two of the most widely-played titles in history.
With this immense popularity, it was inevitable that the game would make it to home consoles, and indeed developer Bluehole signed a deal with Microsoft to make PUBG an Xbox One exclusive by the end of 2017. However, recent news should give PS4 owners hope—according to Bloomberg, Bluehole is “in talks with Sony” about porting the game to their system after the timed exclusivity with Microsoft expires.
The PlayStation faithful shouldn’t start putting in their pre-orders just yet, however. As many are well aware, “early-access” means that the game is still being worked on. Players who have purchased the game already are essentially beta testers, giving Bluehole a large sample that can help detect bugs, test server strength, and push the game to its theoretical limits. Even as the company passed a $4 billion valuation last week, the bigger news was the rollout of the twenty-seventh weekly patch. And as recently as this morning, international audiences have been “review-bombing” the game on Steam due to unfixed lag issues and blatant in-game advertisements.
The game simply isn’t complete and ready to be shipped out to a global audience, and until the PC version is suitable, the Xbox One version won’t be finalized. And until that version has been out for a proper amount of time, there won’t be any PS4 port, either. With up to a hundred players in each royale and enormous maps to explore or plunder, it’s understandable that there would be a host of bugs, glitches, and server issues to iron out. However, Bluehole should maybe put all their eggs in the “finish the game” basket before they start looking ahead to a second console port.