Enough blood and gore: China wants to ban hit game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for not conforming to socialist values

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is the hottest video game of 2017, with more than 15 million copies sold in six months. Now China’s censor wants to ban it

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An eSports gamer plays League of Legends during training for the League of Legends World Championship at a boot camp in Shanghai on September 20. Once dismissed as the pursuit of teens and introverts, eSports is growing fast towards being a billion-dollar industry and has a huge fan base, especially in Asia. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:51pm, 1 Nov 2017Updated: 7:52pm, 1 Nov 2017

The blood and gore that’s made PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds the hottest video game of 2017 may be its undoing in the world’s largest consumer market.

The multiplayer game, where up to 100 players fight each other - like a digital version of the Hunger Games books and movies - to the last person standing, is “full of gore and violence,” and its gladiatorial survival instincts “deviate from China’s socialist core values, traditional Chinese culture and moral norms,” according to a statement by the China Audio-Video & Digital Publishing Association. “It’s not conducive to the physical and mental health of young consumers.”

The association urged the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film & Television, which regulates and licenses of every aspect of content in China, to ban the game in the country.

Published by South Korea’s Bluehole Studio, the computer game that’s also known as PUBG has sold more than 15 million copies at US$30 each in six months, according to Steamspy, which provides analytics data. Up to 2 million players are on it concurrently at any one time, closing in on other popular online games such as Dota and League of Legends in viewership and players.

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China and South Korea are the two major markets that underpin PUBG’s runaway success. In China, the game is accessible through US-based gaming platform Steam, although the experience is mostly unsatisfactory due to poor connectivity and lags in downloading data. Bluehole refers China-based players to Xunyou, which provides a virtual private network (VPN) service that claims to remove the lag.