Kraftons PUBG-spinoff stängs permanent efter att ha misslyckats med att bygga en spelarbas

PUBG: Blindspot, the top-down tactical shooter developed by Krafton's ARC Team, will be removed from Steam at 5 a.m. EDT on Monday, March 30. The announcement follows 53 days in BLINDSPOT early access — one of the shorter runs any major publisher-backed title has managed on Steam before folding. Krafton framed the closure as an inability to sustain the level of experience the team had set out to deliver.

Developer Sequoia Yang published a statement on Steam laying out the reasoning. ARC Team had been "exploring multiple ways to improve the experience and move the game forward" in the weeks since launch but determined it could not "sustainably provide the level of experience we set out to deliver through early access." Yang confirmed the team will remain together and that work on Blindspot will "inform our future development efforts," indicating the studio has not dissolved.

The game entered early access on February 5 as a deliberate structural departure from PUBG's battle royale format. Blindspot ran five-versus-five rounds from a top-down camera perspective across maps with partially destructible environments. One team plants and activates a bomb while the other works to eliminate the opposing side before that happens. Krafton positioned it as a concentrated tactical shooter comparable in structure to Rainbow Six Siege, intended to occupy a different part of the shooter market than PUBG's large-scale matchups.

The player numbers reflected how little of that market it captured. SteamDB records the game's all-time concurrent player peak at 3,251, reached around launch and declining steadily from there. The 24-hour concurrent peak at the time of the shutdown announcement stood at 184. No console version exists to supplement those figures, and the game's entire commercial life played out exclusively on Steam.

I played Blindspot in the days following its February launch and found the game sluggish against comparable top-down and tactical shooters — the controls felt heavier than the genre expects, the art direction left nothing worth remembering, and the PUBG connection didn't materialise into anything mechanically distinctive during play. Boring more often than tense.

In the current multiplayer shooter market, a game that fails to hold players in its first weeks rarely reverses the trajectory. Blindspot's concurrent peak of 3,251 set a ceiling too low for a live-service game to operate from, and the consistent decline in the weeks following launch left ARC Team with limited room to work.

The shutdown places Blindspot alongside Highguard — named this year's most infamous live-service flop — as one of the more abrupt early-access exits from a major publisher this year. Both titles collapsed within their first two months, with Blindspot lasting only slightly longer.

I think the execution failed a concept that had legitimate potential: five-versus-five bomb-plant in destructible environments from a top-down camera is a tested format with a proven audience. Blindspot didn't deliver it at a competitive level. The game is free to download on Steam until servers close at 5 a.m. EDT on March 30.

Read also, PUBG Mobile has launched its 8th Anniversary celebration this week, with Krafton rolling out exclusive rewards, themed content, and special collaborations to mark eight years of the title.