PUBG Lite - the free-to-play, low spec version of Plunkbat - is shutting down
It went fully free back in November
The writing has maybe been on the wall for PUBG Lite for a while. The free-to-play, low spec version of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds ditched its in-game currency in November 2020, becoming completely free. Now a notice from the development team says that the game will close down forever on April 29th.
The announcement was brief, without offering much explanation for the closure:
We are deeply grateful for the passion and support from the astounding number of PUBG LITE fans that have been with us. During the strenuous times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we hope that PUBG LITE was able to provide our fans a fun way to stay safe.
Unfortunately, we have made the difficult decision to close service after much deliberation and the time has come for our journey to end. We regretfully inform you that service of PUBG LITE is scheduled to end on April 29th, 2021 (UTC).
New downloads of the game are already no longer available, having been switched off on March 30th. The closure of the game itself will happen on April 29th at 5am UTC/6am BST.
PUBG Lite was designed to be "playable even on computers and laptops utilising integrated graphics." The game therefore looked worse than the full fat version of PUBG, but it was otherwise much the same game while running on machines with dual core CPUs, 4GB of RAM and no graphics card - a long way from the specs for the daddy version of the game.
Lite rolled out across parts of Asia in early 2019, eventually winding towards Europe in October of that year. I'd imagine this closure will disproportionately affect players in those regions where access to higher spec PCs is harder to come by.
Remember when we used to call PUBG "Plunkbat" and people were mad at us about it all the time? That feels like it was roughly one billion years ago.