Why PUBG Mobile became Game for Peace in China
PUBG Mobile is Tencent’s mobile version of the popular PC battle royale game. Though hugely popular in China, Tencent couldn’t monetize the game there until it made Game for Peace, a blood-free, patriotic version just for China.
PUBG Mobile is the biggest mobile game in the world. It was so popular in China that the country got two of them.
Yet there’s also an unmistakable difference. You don’t actually “die” in Game for Peace. That’s because it’s a sanitized version for the Chinese government that takes out all the blood and makes the game out to be a training exercise for a peacekeeping force.
If you think that’s an odd choice for a shooter, rest assured that Tencent had a very good reason for the change: Money.
For all of PUBG Mobile’s popularity, neither game was officially allowed to monetize in China. As most mobile games rely on lucrative free-to-play mechanics -- get the game for free but pay for lots of little add-ons along the way -- not being able to charge Chinese gamers wasn’t helping Tencent. So they scrapped both PUBG Mobile games, replaced them with the newly sanitized Game for Peace, and received approval to monetize.
Tencent licensed the PUBG intellectual property from Bluehole and released PUBG Mobile for iOS and Android in 2018. Fans praised the game as being a faithful adaptation of its PC counterpart, and it quickly became a global hit.
But in China, Tencent wasn’t leaving anything to chance. The company had its two top studios develop separate PUBG games, one of which would never be made available outside China.
If you’ve ever played PUBG Mobile, you’re probably familiar with the version known in China as PUBG Mobile: Exhilarating Battlefield, which was developed by Tencent’s LightSpeed & Quantum Studio. The other version developed by Timi Studio is PUBG Mobile: Army Attack.
Even though both were made available to download in China, no government approval meant they were only allowed as beta releases. So Tencent wound up with two versions of the same game that it couldn’t even profit from.
Before going full Game for Peace, Tencent tried making PUBG Mobile more palatable to censors. For both versions of the game, blood was replaced with green smoke and the games’ narratives were reoriented to be about a friendly military drill among a hundred trained Chinese soldiers.
It was to no avail. PUBG Mobile remained unable to make money from players in China for more than a year. But Tencent had a plan.
In May 2019, Tencent cloned one of the PUBG Mobile games and branded it Game for Peace. It had the government’s blessing from the get-go and was already monetized at launch.
More than just taking out blood and changing the story, Game for Peace kicked the game’s sanitization up a notch. As the name suggests, the game is about peacekeepers training for future combat on an island. And since the green smoke apparently looked too much like blood, it was replaced with green flashes.
But the most notable -- and widely mocked -- change is that players don’t actually die, but wave farewell. Since this isn’t supposed to be real combat, according to the story, you can’t just die in battle like in any normal shooter. So instead, when you’re struck down, your avatar simply waves goodbye and disappears on the battlefield. That’s way less spooky.
Game for Peace is also a much more patriotic game. From the moment you launch the app, there's already a huge recruitment ad for the Chinese Air Force. If the ad alone doesn’t entice you, you’ll also get a nice view of several Chinese fighter jets soaring across the sky as you to parachute down to the battlefield. How could China’s censors say no to that?
“It's hard to understand what the future of game regulation in China looks like… This turn of events is cartoonishly preposterous,” Charlie Moseley, a game developer in China and founder of the Chengdu Gaming Federation, said at the time.
So Tencent’s third version of PUBG Mobile for China might not have any blood, or even any PUBG references. But it now has a lot more money.
