In part of the game's success in early access, Tencent Games, the largest publisher of video games in China, approached Bluehole that same month with an offer to publish Battlegrounds in China and purchase equity in the company. However, the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association issued a statement in October 2017 that discouraged battle royale-style games, stating that they are too violent and deviate from Chinese values of socialism, deeming it harmful to young consumers. The following month however, PUBG had reached a formal agreement with the Chinese government to allow the release of the game in the country, with Tencent as the publishing partner. However, some changes were made to make sure it aligned with socialist values and traditional Chinese morals. In South Korea, the game is marketed and distributed by Kakao Games. Despite the lack of a Chinese publisher prior to the Tencent deal, players in China had found ways to acquire and play the game through Steam via proxies and other networking tricks. To address it, PUBG Corporation planned to add maximum client ping limits for servers which can reduce the issues with latency problems and prevent some of the cheating that has occurred. This would not prevent cross-region matchmaking but may make it difficult for some players to play outside their region if they have a poor Internet infrastructure. Tencent has also helped by identifying and reporting around 30 software programs to Chinese police that can be used to cheat in Battlegrounds, leading to over a hundred arrests by the beginning of 2018. Separately, this technical issue, in addition to the larger number of Chinese players, has created complaints in the player community. Some Western players fear that many Chinese players are able to cheat in the game by exploiting some of the network latency issues, something that PUBG Corporation continued to address as the game shifted out of early access. However, a small number of players called for server segregation by region and had used racial insults at Chinese players they encountered in game. Greene was disappointed with this "xenophobic attitude", calling it "disgraceful", and asked the player community to respect the Chinese players more as their numbers were a key part of the game's success. Greene also identified that players can easily get around such region locks using virtual private networks, making this approach ineffective. PUBG Corporation eventually added region-based matchmaking by October 2018, though players still reported issues with connectivity and slow matchmaking.
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