PUBG Will be Changed in China to Appease Censors

We had our good news, now it’s time for the weird stuff.

As you may or may not know, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is an extremely popular game over in China, with millions of players logging in every day. But the thing is, the Chinese government has a bad case of no chill, and they are really not okay with games that deviate from their social norms… which PUBG does, decidedly.

Now, the government hasn’t banned it yet, but recently Chinese tech giant Tencent announced that they had earned the exclusive right to release and run the game in China—a necessary step for the game, as China is really not fond of things run by foreigners, and with luck Chinese-based servers would fix the game’s many lag problems.

...But that also means that the game will have to be changed to appease government censors, who have, in past, complained about the game being too violent and deviating from traditional Chinese culture and moral norms. Which, you know, is perfectly fair: there aren’t many modern cultures that normalize convict death games. The problem is that they expect Tencent to update the game to make it more palatable to them, and Tencent has every intention to do exactly that.

“(We) will make adjustment to content ... and make sure they accord with socialist core values, Chinese traditional culture and moral rules. (The game will offer) healthy, positive cultural and value guidance, especially for underage users.”

...Okay. I’m entirely unsure how they plan to do that, but you know, I’m kind of fascinated to see what kind of changes those will be. Are they going to make everyone a capitalist dog fighting to the death for the chance to immigrate to the Chinese communist utopia? Are they going to replace the guns with lasers and the chicken dinner with a humble rice bowl?

Whatever it is, it’ll be stupid. And I’m all about stupid if I don’t have to deal with it.