Good luck with Sony
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been making waves across the streaming community for the past few months, and that’s translated into actual sales — over four million copies in sales actually.
So what’s next? New and altered items, extra stages, polish, and naturally, a console version. Even though a PS4 version is tentatively planned the Xbox One version was the talk of the town at E3, and all signs point toward cross-play with PC.
Speaking to VG247, Battlegrounds executive producer Chang Han Kim (not to be confused with creator Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene), noted that they’re basically all-in on the idea: “Cross network play between the PC and the console is definitely something we want to do down the road, and we don’t anticipate we’ll have any technical issues with that. But…when you consider the competitive side of the game, I do feel that there’s a balance issue between controllers and keyboard and mouse. That’s what’s making it difficult for us to do right away. If we’re going to allow players to use controllers we need to have the aim assist added in and things like that. We’re not going to be supporting it right away, but it’s something we’d like to look into later.”
It’s always tricky for a shooter to implement cross-platform play given the twitch element (the reaction not the streaming service) — Microsoft ran into similar problems with Shadowrun in 2007, and so have many other developers since. Here’s hoping they figure it out, but based on Chang Han Kim’s statement, they have their hearts set on figuring it out.
How PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds went from scrappy mod to one of the games of 2017 [VG247]
