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China will potentially ban PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

China is quite strict on the media it welcomes into its country, with games and movies often being heavily edited to make it through or face being banned entirely. As it stands official Chinese support for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has come to a halt, with one of the biggest titles in the world next in line to face a ban from the biggest market.

Currently, Chinese PUBG players are using international servers to enjoy the game, voicing their disapproval that their local servers aren't up to scratch via review bombing the title on Steam. This has caused a shockwave of unhappy players that pings are unbalancing the game and making it difficult to enjoy.

Bluehole has since been looking into getting a licence for the game in China, publicly announcing that it was in talks with Chinese internet company, Tencent last month. Talks were supposedly going well, however Bloomberg has reported that China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association has spoken out against the title. It says that the battle royale, death-match style in PUBG “deviates from the values of socialism and is deemed harmful to young consumers.”

It’s not impossible for violent games to pass this initial barrier and gain a licence to tap into the hugely lucrative Chinese market, but the realistic character and environmental models set PUBG apart from the cartoony titles such as Honour of Kings, which are already popular in the country.

Even though PUBG likely won’t benefit from the largest video game consumer market on the planet, it is still doing extremely well for itself, having sold over 15 million copies in its 7-month life and boasting the highest concurrent player base on Steam.

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KitGuru Says: This means that, despite the potential ban, Chinese players will be restricted to international servers and local players will have to potentially continue to deal with high ping enemies. Have you had trouble with this on PUBG?

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7 comments

  1. Everyone has. And like a lot of issues with the game, is easily fixed. Have the server run RTT ping checks on the client periodically during an active game and when in the lobby, and kick any players with pings above a per-defined limit. Plenty of games do this.

    Some may take issue with the fact that this “discriminates against Chinese players”. But there is nothing that can be done. BlueHole may argue it cuts off a huge portion of the market from it’s loot boxes. That statement and the presence of such boxes would only show that BlueHole cares about the bottom line.

    So, annoy the Chinese player base, or annoy everyone except for the Chinese player base?

  2. China No.1………..if I hear that one more time.

  3. Honestly, can’t disagree with this 3rd world Internet connections ruin games and pubg will see player counts slowly drop into obscurity unless they do something to actively combat high ping players

  4. Or just put all the high-latency players on the same server, they’ll all have the same conditions?

  5. Mid-game? Wouldn’t work. And the ping in the menus can be miss leading. Not ot mention that, if you’re dedicating a set of servers and setting up filters, you could just use those resources to fix the Chinese ones.

  6. No of course not mid-game, before a game starts, like CSGO checks people’s pings before finding a game.

    And the whole problem is that there aren’t any Chinese servers, isn’t it? Because the company isn’t allowed to host any servers there, so no “servers to fix”. Doesn’t really matter where players are from, if they try to join a server and have too high latency to it, they just shouldn’t be let in.

  7. There are/were Chinese servers, or servers designated to them. It’s hard to tell since I needed to use Google translate, but the player I spoke to did say there was some arrangement of servers that basically didn’t work.