Free-to-play tactical shooter PUBG: Blindspot is being shut down by developers Arc Team and publishers Krafton a whole couple of months into its early access career. Launched on February 5th, it will cease service on March 30th.
It’s a rough turn of events for a game that has mostly positive user reviews as of writing, and which our own former verdict-wrangler Ed Thorn once enthusiastically described as “top-down Rainbow Six Siege with a bit of Hotline Miami”, back when it was codenamed Project Arc. It’s just not a fantastic time to be making any videogames for huge corporations, is it?
“Since our last update, the team has been exploring multiple ways to improve the experience and move the game forward,” Arc Team representative Sequoia Yang writes in a Steam update. “However, after careful consideration, we have come to the conclusion that we are no longer able to sustainably provide the level of experience we set out to deliver through Early Access. We place player experience at the center of every decision we make, and it is based on that principle that we have made this decision.”
Yang adds that “the feedback and support from our players have meant a great deal to the team, and will continue to inform our future development efforts.”
Blindspot was never a heavily anticipated game, for my onions, but it is a younger cousin of PUBG: Battlegrounds, affectionately known hereabouts as Plunkbat, which came out in 2017 and is currently number three on the Steam most played charts. So I imagine internal expectations for the project at Krafton were relatively steep.
Two months is a longer stay of execution than Firewalk’s Concord got in 2024, at least. Sony pulled the plug on that project after a mere three weeks, closing the development studio soon after. On which note, Yang says that ARC Team “will take some time to regroup, and we hope to return with new experiences in the future.”
Krafton seem to be spending all their time these days suing or being sued by Subnautica 2 developers, but they’ve been doing pretty well otherwise, surpassing $2 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2025. A lot of that money came from PUBG: Battlegrounds, which also saw record annual revenue on PC. Still, Krafton have also been looking to cut costs, inviting employees to lay themselves off in November while trumpeting “the era of AI transformation”.
Krafton have one other Plunkbat spin-off in the fire – PUBG: Black Budget. That one’s a first-person extraction shooter with timewarp elements.
