Chinese players love battle royale mobile games, this can be said by looking at the craze for Player Unknown’s Battleground. PUBG Mobile from Tencent is the most popular game in the Chinese market. It is an adaptation of the popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for mobile users.
The free-to-play multiplayer shooter caused a stir among Chinese mobile players earlier this week when Tencent suddenly replaced it with Game for Peace through an update. Nonetheless, the new game looks exactly like the previous one. Moreover, it also came with a feature to carry over the players’ stats and progression into the new game. Hence, not causing any damage to its player database.
PUBG Mobile recently celebrated its one year anniversary in China. Tencent decided to go for a swap when it realised that the game was not able to monetize. This was because the game didn’t meet the Chinese government’s strict media guidelines. Game publishers need to submit their games to the government for approval if they want to legally sell them in China. China is a huge market for games with over 600 million players which makes this significant.
To tackle this situation Tencent developed Game for Peace with the help of its internal team. The new game got approved by the government and the publisher got the green signal to finally monetize its mobile shooter. PUBG mobile players noticed that the new game is a sanitized version of battle royale.
The new game was released and it took the market by a storm. According to market analyst Sensor Tower, the iOS version of Game for Peace has collected $14 million in player spending in just 72 hours.
Tencent announced that Game for Peace will be only available to players aged 16 or above. It also stated that they will limit the play time for those aged 16 to 18 to two hours per day.