PUBG Lite will shut down in late April despite going fully free-to-play

You’ll soon have one less way to play PUBG. As The Verge notes, Krafton has announced that it will shut down PUBG Lite on April 29. The developer has already halted new downloads for the PC-based battle royale title, and the official website is effectively closed. Player support will end on May 29.

The decision to shut down Lite doesn’t affect PUBG Mobile Lite, the phone-oriented equivalent — that game remains intact.

Related: The best battle royale games like PUBG Mobile or Fortnite on Android

Krafton didn’t say why it was going to shut down PUBG Lite. There were signs of trouble months earlier, however.  The studio made the game completely free-to-play in November 2020, pulling the title’s in-game L-Coin currency. It had only been available since a beta released in January 2019, and updates stopped in early 2020.

If demand was to blame, it wouldn’t be completely surprising. While there aren’t readily available player statistics, it’s no secret that there wasn’t a huge audience — people were asking about a lack of human players in 2019. Lite was built to make the PUBG experience accessible to people whose modest computers might struggle with the regular game, but the shut down suggests many PC players were content to use the “full” game instead.

PUBG Mobile Lite should have a safer future. It’s designed to make PUBG Mobile viable on lower-end Android phones, and it has over 100 million installs as of this writing. Even though some of those are likely to be repeats, the downloads suggest there’s a more compelling case for courting budget smartphone owners than there is for entry-level PCs.