Just a few short days after PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) launched on Xbox One, Microsoft has found a way to use it to incentivize consumers to buy an Xbox One X. On Friday, Microsoft announced on the Xbox Wire that anyone who buys an Xbox One X between December 17th and December 31st will receive a free copy of PUBG with their purchase. If you were planning on picking up an Xbox One X anyway, this is just the cherry on top.
For those of you who somehow missed out on the phenomenon when the game hit PC earlier this year, PUBG drops 100 players on to an island with nothing but the shirt on their back, and they are tasked with gathering weapons and gear in order to survive as a deadly circle of death closes in on the map.
Although PUBG has been in Early Access all year (which is basically a work-in-progress version of the game), it has quickly become one of the most popular games to play — and to watch others play — in recent memory. And now, at long last, console players can join in on the fun as PUBG has arrived on Xbox One as part of the Xbox Game Preview program. The only problem is that the Xbox version is in a significantly worse state than the PC version.
Textures not loading in at landing. Unresponsive inventory system. Game crashes at least every 3 matches. Aim acceleration makes ranged fighting very difficult. Desync issues.
These are all issues encountered by a single user in a Reddit feedback thread on the PUBG Xbox One subreddit. That’s a significant number of complaints to have about a game that you’ve been playing for less than a week. When Microsoft says that Xbox Game Preview titles “might be missing content, contain bugs, or need extra balancing work that will come later via updates,” you had really better take their word for it.
But if the Xbox One version of PUBG ends up on the same trajectory as the PC version, it should be fine in the long run. And if you pick up an Xbox One before the end of the year, you’ll have a free copy forever as it improves.
