PUBG: Battlegrounds Becomes Free to Play on All Platforms

Following a 36-hours maintenance, PUBG: Battlegrounds servers have become available again. Moreover, they are available for everyone, since the game has transitioned to the Free-to-Play model on both PC and consoles. The transition is similar to the one CS:GO did in 2018 – old players will have premium accounts and receive special rewards, while new players will start with a basic account with limited set of features.

With the transition to the F2P model the game also received a big update. In Patch 15.2, the developers introduced Tactical Gear – a new category of items intended to providing more gameplay options outside of gunplay. The first two tactical gear items are the Drone, which allows players to scout a far distance safely and even pick up an item, and the EMT Gear, which increases efficacy of healing items. The update also introduces a number of tutorial game modes, as well as features multiple improvements and fixes, all of which can be found on the official website.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was officially released in December 2017 as a buy-to-play title. According to Steam statistics, a month later the game reached its peak number of concurrent players – over 3.2M players. Since then however the game’s numbers have been constantly decreasing, and last month the peak number of players was about 360,000.