We've known that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is coming to Xbox One, and even that Microsoft themselves was partnering wwith the team to make it happen. Today we learned that they sent in the Coalition to make the porting easier.
For those who don't know, the Coalition is the name of the developers for Gears of War 4. They've been tasked with helping them along as professional, exclusively console developers. NNico Bihary, Microsoft's executive producer on the project told Polygon in an interview that his organization has gone above and beyond what normally happens in terms of support for a second-party developer.
“It’s been quite a journey for us. There was this global assessment within Microsoft of how can we pair up with this super collaborative, super friendly and incredibly successful — in the short term — group for our partnership to deliver. As you can imagine, there were a lot of raised hands within Microsoft to offer support. PUBG is really getting the boutique, first-party, white-glove treatment from Microsoft.”
PUBG has been taking names in the PC world, topping two million concurrent players on Steam. The transition from PC to Xbox One has required an extra bit of work, but it has been Microsoft's goal to help in any way possible.
“By virtue of being publisher there’s some traditional housekeeping that we do,” Bihary said. “Where we are going well beyond that traditional second-party publishing relationship is by offering services like our first-party quality assurance team, offering services like our advanced technical group and enlisting folks like The Coalition to help with the aiming and tuning of controller systems.”
The Microsoft Game Preview program, which PUBG will be featured on when it launches on December 12, is essentially the Xbox version of Steam Early Access. While development between console and PC versions will not be 1-to-1, it's been said by developers that it will be "pretty much the same." Despite this, it will not launch at 60 FPS, though PUBG's Brenden Greene it's in the queue of things to do.
