"After reviewing the project's development status and future direction, we judged that the current direction would make it difficult to deliver an experience players can enjoy for a long time," the studio said, adding that testing had ended with it.
The game dropped players onto Coli, an island locked in a time loop, as contractors sent to loot a classified research site and fight their way to an extraction point.
Up to 45 of them played in three-man squads against rival teams, artificial intelligence creatures and supernatural anomalies.
Krafton first disclosed the title as Project Black Budget in its third-quarter 2022 earnings materials, calling it a PvPvE looter shooter, and attached the PUBG name to it in November 2025.
Two closed alpha tests followed, in December and in June.
Testers of the first alpha pointed to muddled combat perception, weak situational clarity and fatigue over repeated runs, the studio said when that test closed, along with crashes and unauthorized programs.
The cancellation trails the shutdown of PUBG: Blindspot, a top-down 5-on-5 shooter, on March 30, less than two months after its early access debut.
Krafton said in January it was running a pipeline of 26 new titles while turning PUBG into a content platform.
AJP Takeaways
- Krafton ended development of PUBG: Black Budget on Oct. 1, 2026, closing a push that began when the project first appeared in the company's Q3 2022 earnings materials.
- The extraction shooter ran two closed alpha tests, from Dec. 12 to Dec. 21, 2025 and from June 26 to June 29, 2026, and never received a release date.
- PUBG: Blindspot, Krafton's other PUBG spin-off, shut down on March 30, 2026, about eight weeks after its Feb. 5 early access launch.
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