PUBG Adding Battle Royale Movie Cosmetics

Some players are unhappy with the paid cosmetic items.

By Tom Marks

Next week PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds three new crates containing cosmetics inspired by the Japanese movie Battle Royale will be added to the game.

In an update posted to the game's Steam community page, the game's developer revealed the new content will come partly to "test the basic crate and key system we want to implement in the final version of the game."

Two of the new crates, the Wanderer and Survivor crates, are free to open and will contain items from two different sets of cosmetics. The third crate will be called the Gamescom Invitational Crate, referring to the recently announced LAN tournament taking place at Gamescom next month, and will have items from a much wider pool of five Battle Royale-themed cosmetic sets.

The one caveat for that final crate is that the Gamescom Invitational Crate can only be opened by purchasing a key for $2.50, and will stop being available once Gamescom concludes on August 27. The Steam post announcing the new crates said that money from sales of the keys will go toward the cost of organizing the tournament, a prize pool for the winners, and “a selection of charities.”

Adding paid cosmetics was always part of the plan for Battlegrounds, but some players are angry that developer Bluehole has done so while the game is still in Steam Early Access. In an interview with Gamasutra back in May, creator Brendan “PLAYERUNKNOWN” Greene said “we're not doing monetization during early access, it'll be afterwards.”

A similar statement was made in an official 2017 roadmap for the game posted in February, which said the following:

“As far as monetization is concerned, know that we eventually intend to give the player options to purchase cosmetic items only. However, until the game is out of Early Access, our development resources will be focused entirely on improving the Battle Royale game mode. Only then will we consider the addition of in-game purchases.”

The latest post regarding these new crates explicitly states that this paid crate is a limited time offer, and that "Once Gamescom is complete, on August 27th, the Gamescom Invitational Crate will be no longer available and removed from the game. We will then return to the free-to-open system."

Items have also been offered outside of the game tied to other promotional opportunities, including exclusive skins made available for Twitch Prime members who linked their Twitch account to their PUBG account.

All three crates will be added to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Thursday, August 3 as part of its regular monthly update, along with a new rifle and an FOV slider for the first-person view.

Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

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