PUBG: Black Budget was first mentioned in a November 2023 investor presentation. It was an extraction shooter planned to release in the months ahead. Two years later it got a Steam page and a teaser trailer but still wasn’t out. Now it’s getting canceled.
“After reviewing the project’s development status and future direction, we concluded that its current direction would not allow us to deliver an experience players could enjoy over the long term,” Krafton wrote in an update on Steam. “We have therefore made the difficult decision to end development of PUBG: Black Budget. We sincerely thank everyone who took the time to participate in our closed alpha tests and share their feedback.”
The spin-off would have been a first-person PvPvE game about trying to recover secret technology from an abandoned research facility on an island caught in a time loop. It looked like your run-of-the-mill military shooter, but would have supernatural components in the mold of something like the TV show Lost. Between matches, players would work on upgrading their character and crafting their base.
It started testing just as Arc Raiders was blowing up. Months later, Marathon came out and struggled to make a similar splash, despite being great. With the extraction shooter space increasingly saturated, and possibly a lack of positive user feedback from the closed tests being run over the last year, Krafton has apparently decided to pull the plug. The publisher also canceled PUBG: Blindspot, a knock-off of Rainbow Six Siege, after just two months in Early Access.
“PUBG Studios will carry what we learned from development and testing into future projects, continuing to listen to players as we explore new gameplay experiences,” the company announced today.
