PUBG: Battlgrounds Free-To-Play Week On Steam

If you were born before 2007, you may know of this thing called the Battle-Royale. Not just the Japanese book of 1999 which is the superior version of The Hunger Games, but the genre of games that came following the release of the Jennifer Lawrence-led films. While Fortnite laps up the rewards from having a cup of coffee singing at an in-game concert, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds still plays battleships in the sandbox of its DayZ-like graphics. Oh, and for some reason that I still don’t understand, they renamed it to have a massive redundancy.

Those of you old enough to remember 2001 vividly may still be trying to get the name of a French cheeseburger out of your head, but we’ll move on nonetheless. Ok, joking aside, the newly named Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds is currently free-to-play on Steam. Unlike everything else in this article, that wasn’t a joke; KRAFTON (formally Bluehole), the people behind PUBG, added an extra battleground to the title. I assume they couldn’t rename it PUBG: Frying Pan?

Players who bother to download the game will get to play the whole game with all maps and modes, including the new map. The aforementioned map is Taego, set in the South Korean 80s, as you do the usual battle-royale thing: Fall out a plane, find a flare gun and a luminescent yellow sweatshirt, and run around for a bit, get shot in the head from miles away. I can honestly say, I’ve never seen anyone play any other map than that one that everyone played for the 3-6 months the game was popular. I could try and “BS” my way through most of this, but I think we’d both see through it.

As KRAFTON notes in a Steam post update, the game will be free-to-play until the morning of Monday, August 16th. Unlike the weekly free games with Epic, this isn’t something you keep. It is more akin to a timed demo, and that’s in the 90s sense of demo, where you’d get half the game to play. However, you’ll be able to carry all progress (XP, Mission Rewards, and everything else) over from this free week of play into any purchase of the game. As far as I’m understanding it, the only thing you are unable to access during this free week before purchase is the in-game store.