Tencent has announced a smartphone game in China that closely resembles the popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. An hour after the announcement, almost a million interested people are said to have registered for the beta.
Tencent calls the game Glorious Mission and has put a Chinese website online with information about the game and a movie. The appearance shows many similarities with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, although the style is somewhat simpler, due to the limited graphical processing power of smartphones.
Just like in PUBG, a hundred players jump out of a plane on an island and the last one standing wins. While this battle royale concept isn’t unique, Tencent has also adopted the island’s appearance, buildings, and weapons from PUBG. It is not known whether the Chinese internet company has an agreement with the South Korean developer of the PC game.
The smartphone game is probably only intended for the Chinese market. Players can register for a beta on the website and a counter shows over 900,000 registrations. Whether these are real players is not clear, the number does not seem to be increasing quickly at the moment.
PlayerUknown’s Battlegrounds is very popular in China. A chart from Steam Spy recently showed that there are almost six million active players in China. That is much more than in other countries or regions. The creator of PUBG made Tuesday known The game has since sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Tencent is one of the largest internet companies in the world. It is the owner of Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends. Tencent also owns a minority stake in Activision Blizzard and a majority stake in Finnish mobile game developer Supercell. It is also the maker of chat service WeChat, which has nearly a billion users.