Since the announcement of their partnership, Microsoft says they’ve given enhanced support to the team at PUBG Corporation to bring Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds to market. That includes loaning them the time and expertise of The Coalition, makers of Gears of War 4.

Nico Bihary is Microsoft’s executive producer on the project. He says that while Battlegrounds is technically a second-party title, his organization has nonetheless given it enhanced support. In many ways, Bihary said, it’s being treated like a first-party title.

“It’s been quite a journey for us,” Bihary told Polygon. “There was this global assessment within Microsoft of how can we pair up with this super collaborative, super friendly and incredibly successful — in the short term — group for our partnership to deliver. As you can imagine, there were a lot of raised hands within Microsoft to offer support.

“PUBG is really getting the boutique, first-party, white-glove treatment from Microsoft.”

Battlegrounds, the multiplayer survival shooter that has dominated Steam since its launch in March of this year, announced at this year’s E3 that it would be coming to the Xbox One. That effort has required quite a bit of work for the team. Bihary says that it has been Microsoft’s goal to assist in any way possible, and that includes leveraging the minds at The Coalition.

“By virtue of being publisher there’s some traditional housekeeping that we do,” Bihary said. “Where we are going well beyond that traditional second-party publishing relationship is by offering services like our first-party quality assurance team, offering services like our advanced technical group and enlisting folks like The Coalition to help with the aiming and tuning of controller systems.”

What specifically The Coalition contributed, in terms of headcount or hours worked, Bihary wasn’t able to say. Nevertheless, its experts were able to lend their knowledge to the team building Battlegrounds to help ease that game onto the Xbox platform. The goal was to always be “enabling them to just focus on what’s important” to make the game fun to play.

The Microsoft Game Preview program, which Battlegrounds will launch into on Dec. 12, is similar to Steam’s Early Access. The development of the game started after the PC version, so naturally the Xbox version of the game won’t be quite at the same point of development as the original. Bihary said to expect an experience similar to the one found around May or June of this year on PC.

“We have benefitted from optimizations,” Bihary said. “We will get cool things like vaulting and climbing, and it’s our hope that at some point we’re hoping that our content roadmaps converge, but there’s still going to be a delta for some period of time.”

The game will retail for $30. Bihary said that Microsoft has “no plans or announcements regarding microtransactions,” other than the set of Xbox exclusive cosmetic upgrades announced earlier this week.