Ever since PUBG pioneered the genre and the subsequent rise of Fortnite, battle royale has been the dominant shooter mode of choice online. But now, the emergence of the extraction shooter as a mainstream concern, namely the popularity of Arc Raiders, threatens to take that crown.
For nearly a decade, players have been going head-to-head to be the last standing, and while other genre contenders, such as the hero shooter, have had their successes, battle royale remains the most popular, whether that be Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, or Apex Legends.
But that won’t last forever, and is something Taeseok Jang, head of PUBG Studios, is very aware of. Hence, the developer is already branching out the PlayerUnknown experience into other formats. The most notable of these is the currently in-development Black Budget, the Korean studio’s venture into the extraction shooter market.
“I believe in its potential, so that’s why we are making Black Budget,” Jang explains in an interview with IGN, when asked if extraction shooters could ever overtake battle royales. “The genre itself is very complicated compared to shooter genres in terms of gameplay, and also, as a developer, it is not easy to make a good extraction shooter. But I think Arc Raiders has proven that it has huge potential. So yeah, I believe that it has huge potential.”
Arc Raiders really has proven itself as the breakout extraction shooter hit, having sold over 14 million copies and reaching nearly 1 million concurrent players in the first few months after its launch. It’s become somewhat rare for a live-service shooter to find so much success of late, though, with games like Concord and Highguard shutting down in a matter of weeks of release. The jury is still very much out on Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter, too, which has garnered much critical acclaim but nowhere near the player numbers of an Arc Raiders.
So, what is the key to a successful live-service shooter launch in 2026? “That’s what I want to know,” Jang jokingly told me in Seoul. Krafton’s experiment in the mobile market with PUBG Blindspot has already come to an end before it made it out of early access, with the announcement of its closure coming around the ninth anniversary of Battlegrounds.
“As you can see, it is true that launching a live service is very difficult these days,” Jang continues. “And I think in the past, the number of live service games themselves was smaller than now, and at that time these live services were emerging in the market one by one, but now it is more difficult for live services to enter that niche market. But what I can tell you now is that the core of the game is fun. So if you find the core fun factors that you can appeal to players, then you can naturally find the niche market and position in the live-service industry. And if you pursue that effort to make a fun game and the USP that you can appeal to, then it will naturally make you successful.”
Sounds simple. But the truth is, many “fun” games have failed to attract and grow an audience over the past few years, whether those be WB’s Multiversus, EA’s Knockout City, or Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers. Sadly, for every Arc Raiders, there are a hundred fun games that fail to find a fraction of its success.
No release window has been given yet, but we’ll see how well PUBG: Black Budget’s attempt to break into the extraction shooter space does when it arrives, and if Krafton has managed to find that key to live-service success that Battlegrounds benefited so much from in the first place.
For more about PUBG, check out the original battle royale has Fortnite in its sights as it aims to become a “global cultural icon.”
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
