PUBG: Black Budget, an extraction shooter spin-off of Krafton’s battle royale, has been cancelled after just under a year of closed alpha testing. Krafton cited a lack of faith that Black Budget’s “current direction” would lead to “an experience players could enjoy over the long term” as the reasoning behind their call to end development. Though, they insisted PUBG Studios have learned valuable lessons that’ll serve 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 players could enjoy over the long term,” the publishers wrote in a short development update post 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.
“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.”
Black Budget was only revealed in November last year, and didn’t even get a full release date prior to Krafton pulling out of it. The game was pitched as a “tactical extraction shooter” about mercenaries trying to recover top-secret tech from an abandoned research facility on an island trapped in a time loop. Cue lots of shooting while running from purple clouds that indicate the supernatural time threat, dubbed the Anomaly.
It’s not the only attempted PUBG spin-off to bite the dust not too long into its lifespan. Back in March, top-down shooter PUBG: Blindspot was pulled offline just a couple of months after arriving in early access. The reasons given in that case were similar to those offered for Black Budget’s canning. Devs ARC Team said they’d “come to the conclusion that [they] are no longer able to sustainably provide the level of experience [they] set out to deliver through early access”, and thus were cutting their losses while taking lessons learned into “future development efforts”.
Both of these PUBG spin-offs have ended up rather flying under the radar compared to hugely successful forebear Battlegrounds, hence Black Budget’s eulogy being a short Steam note, but it’s a bit strange to see the publishers not attempt to give at least one of them a bit more runway. The struggles experienced by the likes of Marathon to develop into world-beaters might reasonably give studios reason to reconsider the extracty dreams, but you’re never going to have another live service shootery hit take off long term if you keep getting cold feet so early on.