The wait is over and, after a month since the announcement of this expected change, PUBG Battlegrounds is already a game free to play And, therefore, it can now be downloaded for free for all platforms on which the game is available, PC (on Steam), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series S | X, Xbox One and Google Stadia. Recall that, until yesterday, the price of PUBG Battlegrounds for PC, on Steam, was 29.99 euros, so the savings from today are more than considerable.
The announcement of his move to the model free to play It came just a few months after Tencent changed the name of the game last summer, formerly called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (hence its name, the acronym PUBG), in what we understood at the time as the first sign that major changes were coming, something that has now been confirmed with the move to free to play, but that surely will not be the only novelty that we are going to see around the title.
As we saw in the summer of 2020, when Rocket League took this same step, users who have purchased the game, as compensation, will receive a set of assets, part of which will be exclusive to these players, while others will be available to any PUBG Battlegrounds player. And it is that, of course, that the game itself becomes free does not mean, much less that the payments in it disappear.
In fact, although PUBG Battegrounds is now free, the mode ranked, as well as some additional features, will only be accessible with the Battlegrounds Plus bundle, an additional package priced at 12.99 euros. An important detail, yes, is that this Plus mode is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Thus, if you want to participate in ranked and you did not pay for the game, the cost of doing so will be less than what the players had to face until yesterday.
Personally it seems to me a very clever move by Tencent. PUBG Battlegrounds has been around for a long time, so it is understandable that the vast majority of people who were willing to pay for the game have already done so. With this change, the door is opened to more casual players who, in the first instance, will serve to substantially increase their user base, something that is already positive in itself.
But, in addition, it is quite likely that many of these casual players, over time, will “specialize” a little more and, over time, decide to purchase the Plus package or, at least, to make some other in-app purchase. Thus, it is not that the company is going to stop receiving money for each copy of PUBG Battlegrounds, because in reality these would not be real sales. Instead, it opens the platform to everyone, with the possibility that some of those users do make some kind of expense in the game.
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