PUBG Mobile gets surprise release in the West
One of the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds mobile ports created for China has made it across the pond, in localised form no less.
As part of PUBG Corp.'s deal with Chinese tech giant Tencent, the company not only acquired the rights to publish the PC game in China, it also announced at the time that it's working on two mobile off-shoots.
Both have been released in beta in China since, but Tencent did not say if we're going to be getting either of them in the West. This week, without any prior announcements from Tencent or PUBG Corp., a beta for PUBG Mobile popped up on the Canadian Google Play Store.
This is a localised version of Lightspeed & Quantum's mobile game, and it's the one that most closely resembles the tactical gameplay found in the PC original. The Store page has all the marks of an official product, though strangely, Tencent's website link redirects to Arena of Valor's official site.
There's also a Facebook page that went live at the beginning of the month. The most recent post advertises the Canadian store beta, too.
Anyone in Canada can download the beta and play it now, and those outside can change their phone's region to get access to the Canadian store. That said, it'll probably show up in other regions soon as most mobile game betas tend to after their initial limited launch.
No word yet on an iOS version, but you can watch gameplay from PUBG Mobile in Uptodown's video below:
The timing of this couldn't have been more perfect. Fortnite Battle Royale, PUBG's biggest competitor, recently announced that a mobile version is on the way.
Thanks, PCGamesN.