PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been one of the biggest games this year and it’s not even out of Early Access yet. At PAX, AusGamers spoke to Microsoft’s General manager of Global Games Publishing, Shannon Loftis about the future of the Xbox One as well as about the release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on their console.
While the game will launch exclusively for the Xbox consoles initially, it will be a timed exclusive. The game is set to release in Early Access for the Xbox One on December 12th and the PC version will be leaving Early Access at a later date in the same month.
Shannon Loftis expressed that Bluehole have done an amazing job at communicating with fans and listening to their feedback so as to make the necessary changes to the game. Loftis states that this trend of early engagement with players may be typical in the future.
When asked how Microsoft managed to land the deal, Shannon Loftis said, “It’s my secret sauce. I can’t tell you that,” she joked and continued, “What I’ll tell you though is that we watched streaming services and we watched Steam concurrent numbers, and we do that a lot. We’re constantly looking, and we have people passionate about games, Mike Ybarra is a great example of somebody, and he’s our platform lead, who loved the game from the first time that he played it and he was a big advocate internally. So, between the gamers we know and love and the publicly available sources of information, sometimes you get lucky and get in first.”
Microsoft has been closely working with Bluehole to provide adequate development support and to ensure a smooth release in a month’s time. Anyway, Microsoft has certainly gotten lucky by landing an exclusive launch with the biggest gaming phenomenon of the year.
