The people behind PUBG believe the extraction shooter is the next big thing
Tucked inside a report to investors, one sees the plans PUBG: Battlegrounds publisher Krafton has made to extricate itself from a battle royale market it helped create, but which seems to be plateauing, even for the Big Four (including Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Call of Duty:Warzone) that dominate the space.
PUBG’s studio is working on an extraction shooter, a subgenre that looks like the way of the future, especially for the heavy hitters among first-person shooter developers. The game so far is called “Project BlackBudget,” South Korea-based Krafton told investors last week, and a three-pronged launch — PC, console, and mobile — is on the table.
Krafton is “challenging ourselves to popularize the extraction shooter genre,” the company said. Here’s the thing: It may be popular enough already, and Krafton’s trying to cut as big a slice as it can get following Call of Duty:Warzone’s success with its still-in-beta DMZ mode.
Extraction shooters have been around in earnest since at least 2019, when Escape From Tarkov — by then almost three years old — caught fire atop the charts of both Twitch and Steam. Their concepts can also be found in modes like The Dark Zone of 2016’s Tom Clancy’s The Division and its 2019 sequel, as well as — naturally — DayZ. A mod of that game became PUBG: Battlegrounds.
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But we’ve also seen an uptick in good, stand-alone extraction shooters, or at least interesting early-access attempts at getting shooter fans’ attention. That’s come over a yearlong stretch that has been absolutely brutal on new ideas pursuing either a battle royale or battle pass model, or both.
The biggest casualties:
Other signs that the shooter genre, on the whole, culls out weaker ideas at a faster pace because so
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