PUBG Lite, a free-to-play, low-requirement alternative to the smash-hit battle royale, will be shutting down towards the end of next month, on April 29th. The launch of PUBG Lite back in 2019 was intended to bring the beloved title to fans with lower-end PCs.
While it eventually made its way to Europe after the 2019 beta in Thailand, PUBG Lite never managed to catch on quite the way other iterations of the title have. As interest in the game waned, Krafton—the developers—made the decision to pull the plug.
Krafton did not offer an official reason alongside the announcement, but with PUBG Mobile more or less supplanting the need for a low-spec PC version, Krafton likely discovered that PUBG Lite simply couldn't capture the market in the way it intended. At over a billion downloads, PUBG Mobile already boasts the sort of global appeal that captures those players unable to run the full desktop version.
As PUBG Lite is closed down, players can still look forward to the company's upcoming titles. In fact, in light of the success of PUBG Mobile, the publishers recently announced a new, futuristic mobile game in the series, PUBG: New State. While PUBG Lite will ultimately go down as a rare miss for the company, even the upcoming New State must bring something fresh or risk oversaturating the market. In an effort to go an entirely different direction, Tencent—the developers on PUBG Mobile—are working on a co-op zombie survival title called Undawn that is expected to release later this year.
PUBG Lite will be available on PC until April 29th.