If you haven’t heard – and honestly, it’s hard not to – PlayersUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a huge success. Along with selling millions of copies while still being in Early Access, the game recently achieved the highest peak player count for a non-Valve game. At the time of achieving this, it was only behind Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
There’s obviously plenty to like about the good ol’ PUBG and that’s despite the multitude of issues that it faces. Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene and developer Bluehole have been hard at work on updates for PC but what about the Xbox One (and by extension, Xbox One X) version? Greene recently spoke to CNET about progress on the console port handled by Anticto and which enters Xbox Game Preview later this year.
Speaking about Microsoft, Greene noted that, “They trust us. They’re happy. I’m not really that involved with the Xbox development side of things, but [Microsoft] is not looking to influence the game in any way, they just want to help us get the best version of the game onto Xbox. They send some developers over here to work with us, to figure out how to optimize the game.”
There’s both bad news and good news in that department. While it will take a while for the game to be properly optimized, Greene was happy to report that even unoptimized, over 30 FPS performance had been achieved on an Xbox One X dev kit. This was, as he noted, “a completely unoptimized port of the PC version.”
Greene further noted that development on the console port won’t affect the PC version. “When people heard we were moving to Xbox, they’re like ‘Oh! Never going to finish the PC version!’ because that’s the way it is, but Anticto are based in a different country, so the resources that have been dedicated to the PC version haven’t been diminished.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is out later this year for Xbox One and Xbox One X with a full launch on PC planned for 2018.