'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' Could Launch On PS4, 'Every Platform' Someday, CEO Says

“PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” was the biggest gaming story of 2017, as the game reached astronomical levels of popularity and brought about a new kind of multiplayer shooter. The game, which piles 100 players onto an island and asks them to reenact the film “Battle Royale,” spent most of 2017 as a PC exclusive before hitting Xbox One in December.

Meanwhile, owners of the most popular home console on the market have wondered when they can play “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” on their PlayStation 4. In an interview with Inven Global, PUBG Corporation CEO Chang Han Kim said he hopes everyone will get to play “Battlegrounds” someday, Polygon reported.

“As it’s going to be an exclusive title on Xbox One for some time, we’d like to focus on completing the Xbox One PUBG for now. If we have the opportunity, the final goal would be to launch the title on every platform.

Early Access on Steam and Game Preview on Xbox One are like pre-release, so they don’t have a restriction on quality. However, PS is very strict about this. There were cases where a game took 6 months more to launch even when it was already completed. We are still in the stage of learning the console development environment and console gamers’ taste. We need to think about other platforms after evaluating and completing the Xbox One version first.”

In other words, PS4 owners should not expect to get “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” for a while. It is still in active development as part of the Xbox Game Preview program, which allows developers to sell unfinished games on the Xbox marketplace. While the PC version exited the unfinished stage of development in December, the Xbox version lags behind in terms of features and bug fixes. As such, the Xbox version has faced criticism for performance issues.

PlayStation does not have an equivalent service, so the game will not hit that platform until it is “done” on Xbox One. Microsoft likely brokered a deal to keep the game exclusive to Xbox in the console market for a certain amount of time, similar to how 2015’s “Rise of the Tomb Raider” was an Xbox One exclusive for 12 months. PlayStation 4 owners can play the free and popular alternative “Fortnite Battle Royale” in the meantime.

In the interview with Inven Global, Kim also made a noteworthy comment about the future of the game as a media property. He said he envisions going into the worlds of “Esports, movies, drama, cartoons, animation” and more with “Battlegrounds.” With the game recently hitting 3 million concurrent players, Kim seemingly wants to strike while the iron is hot.