Having tried for months to get approval to release (and more importantly, monetise) PUBG in China, publisher Tencent has had enough and pulled the game, replacing it with something that looks very similar.
As Reuters reports, the new game is called Game For Peace, which “pays tribute to the blue sky warriors that guard our country’s airspace”, aka the Chinese Air Force. If you were expecting a solemn homage to the country’s military, though, you are in for a surprise.
Here’s what Game For Peace looks like in action:
That…certainly looks familiar. And I hope you stuck around long enough to notice the “paintball” effects when shooting, and that opponents don’t die, they just wave gently at you before fading out.
Game For Peace is so similar to PUBG, in fact, that players noticed after the change that they retained the same level they’d previously held, and some even “found themselves at a place in the game that strongly resembled the place they left off in PUBG, complete with PUBG gaming history.”
Despite this, Tencent claims the game was developed in-house, and that “they are very different genres of games”.
The big difference from the publishing side of things is that Game For Peace, unlike PUBG, has “regulatory approval to generate revenue”.