In 2025, Arc Raiders took the world by storm and piqued the gaming community’s interest in extraction shooters. That is when Krafton, the developer behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, announced PUBG: Black Budget, its own take on the genre.

PUBG: Battlegrounds launched in 2017 when battle royales were the number-one online multiplayer game. The hype for the genre has decreased considerably since then, and gamers have moved on to other online games. Last year, gamers turned their attention to extraction shooters with the launch of Arc Raiders and the full release of Escape from Tarkov. Krafton wanted in on the action and began developing its own extraction shooter, PUBG: Black Budget. Despite Closed Alpha tests taking place in December and the following June, the company was not satisfied with the state of the game. That is why, a year later, Krafton decided to call it quits and cancel PUBG: Black Budget.

PUBG: Black Budget canceled after one year in development

Image: PUBG Corporation/Krafton, Inc.

During its development stage, Krafton held several PUBG: Black Budget closed tests so players could get a feel for the game and provide feedback to the developers, allowing them to further improve it. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been enough. As announced in a post on the game’s Steam page, Krafton has ended development of Black Budget. Developer PUBG Studios explains why the project will not move forward:

“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. 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.”

PUBG: Black Budget is still available to wishlist on Steam, but as far as we know, this will be the final blog post on its page. This isn’t the first time that Krafton has pursued an experimental project that didn’t pan out. PUBG: Blindspot was one of its development projects whose life was also cut short after failure.

On the bright side, PUBG fans still have an upcoming game that they can look forward to. Although there have been no recent updates about PUBG DED.NET, an upcoming multiplayer roguelite revealed at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, it is still being developed. Hopefully, it will have a better ending compared to Krafton’s other failed extraction shooter experiment.