PUBG’s experimental spinoff Blindspot will be permanently shut down next week

PUBG: Blindspot, a top-down spin-off of the popular battle royale game PUBG, will be discontinued less than two months after its Early Access launch on Steam. Anyone who still wants to try the game has their last chance this weekend.

Early Access is ending, and PUBG: Blindspot will disappear from Steam on Monday, March 30th, at 5 AM EDT. The game was only available in Early Access for 53 days. That’s only slightly longer than Highguard, the most infamous live-service flop of the year.

PUBG: Blindspot: Early Access not on the desired level

A message on Steam, which is credited to the developer Sequoia Yang, explains that while the ARC team “explored various avenues to improve the player experience and further develop the game,” they ultimately concluded that they “cannot sustainably guarantee the desired level of player experience during Early Access.” The ARC team will remain in place for the time being, and Yang states that their work on PUBG: Blindspot “will influence our future development efforts.”

Krafton and the ARC team at PUBG Corporation released PUBG: Blindspot on February 5th. Instead of a sprawling battle royale game, it presented itself as a much more intimate, tactical top-down shooter reminiscent of Rainbow Six Siege. Two teams of five players faced off in levels with largely destructible environments. One team attempted to plant and detonate a bomb, while the other tried to eliminate the opposing team first.

However, the game never managed to reach a large player base. According to SteamDB PUBG: Blindspot reached a peak of 3,251 concurrent players at launch, but the numbers have steadily declined since then. At the time of writing, the 24-hour peak is a mere 207 players, which is unsatisfactory considering the game is currently only available on Steam.

Many players felt PUBG: Blindspot was sluggish compared to other top-down and tactical shooters. The graphics and character design were also frequently criticized, and the connection to PUBG wasn’t really noticeable.

In the multiplayer shooter genre, new games really need to stand out and be a lot of fun to be successful. PUBG: Blindspot didn’t manage to do that and is therefore being shut down. Anyone who wants to try the game one last time before it disappears for good can download it for free on Steam this weekend and play it until 5 a.m. EDT on March 30th.