PUBG: Black Budget, a pull-shooter spin-off of Krafton’s battle royale, has been canceled after just under a year of closed alpha testing. Krafton cited a lack of confidence in Black Budget’s “current direction” that would lead to “an experience that players could enjoy in the long term” as the reason behind their call to end development. However, they insisted that PUBG Studios learned valuable lessons that will be used in future games.
“After reviewing the project’s development status and future direction, we concluded that its current direction would not allow us to deliver an experience that players could enjoy over the long term,” the editors wrote in a short development post on Steam. “We have therefore made the difficult decision to end development on PUBG: Black Budget. We sincerely thank everyone who took the time to participate in our closed alpha testing and share their feedback.
“PUBG Studios will apply what we learned from development and testing in future projects, continuing to listen to players while exploring new gaming experiences.”
Black Budget was only revealed in November of last year and didn’t even get a full release date before Krafton pulled out. The game was billed as a “tactical extraction shooter” in which mercenaries attempt to recover top secret technology from an abandoned research facility on an island trapped in a time loop. Spot lots of gunfire while fleeing purple clouds that indicate the supernatural temporal threat, dubbed the Anomaly.
This isn’t the only PUBG spin-off attempt to bite the dust shortly after its lifespan. Back in March, top-down shooter PUBG: Blindspot was taken offline just months after arriving in Early Access. The reasons given in this case were similar to those given for the canning of Black Budget. The ARC development team stated that it “came to the conclusion that (it) was no longer able to sustainably deliver the level of experience (it) had planned to provide through early access”, and was thus cutting its losses while taking the lessons learned into “future development efforts”.
These two PUBG spin-offs ended up flying rather unnoticed compared to their successful predecessors Battlegrounds, hence Black Budget’s eulogy being a short Steam rating, but it’s a little strange to see the publishers not attempt to give at least one of them a little more runway. Marathon’s struggles to become world champions could reasonably give studios reason to reconsider their Extraction dreams, but you’ll never have another live service shoot that takes off in the long run if you continue to get cold feet this early.
