According to developer Krafton's latest earnings report, PUBG: Battlegrounds, the PC and console version of the battle royale shooter series, is making a lot of money since its switch to free-to-play in January.
According to the report, PC sales increased by 61% year on year to $82.3 million. On console, sales increased 124 percent from the previous quarter and 274 percent year over year, though Krafton did not provide a dollar figure for those increases. From Q4 2021 to Q4 2022, the game's average monthly active users "nearly tripled."
When PUBG: Battlegrounds first launched on Steam in early access in 2017, it was a paid title, but the massive financial success of free-to-play battle royale shooters like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Apex Legends demonstrated that the free model can be quite lucrative. To give you an idea of how profitable it is, EA announced this week that Apex Legends, a game that has been out for just over three years, has surpassed $2 billion in lifetime net bookings. In addition, Epic raised $144 million for Ukraine relief in just two weeks of Fortnite revenue.
So switching PUBG: Battlegrounds to free-to-play was most likely a simple decision for Krafton. And the popularity of PUBG: Mobile (which is also free to play) probably helped; Krafton claims that game, which had been downloaded more than 1 billion times as of March 2021, earned $307.1 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2022, a 5 percent increase year over year.