PUBG won’t be getting early access updates as often anymore

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has come a long way in early access since it was released in March, thanks in large part to weekly and monthly updates that help bring the game to new levels.

Now, though, the schedule of updates will be changing, according to a blog post by developer Bluehole. The scheduled weekly and monthly updates will not be rolling out as often as before, but the developer promises that content and fixes are still coming.

“Until the official release of the game, we will not have our scheduled weekly or monthly patches rolling out as often as before,” said the blog post. “We’ve found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update.”

One of the main points for changing the schedule of updates is to better utilize the game’s test servers, offering longer periods of time for new changes to be more thoroughly tested out before they are pushed to live servers.

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“Although we may not release a weekly patch, we will utilize the test servers for significantly longer periods of time and deploy patches and hotfixes when necessary,” Bluehole said. “This way, when we have a new feature that we’d like to roll-out it will be more thoroughly polished thanks to extensive community feedback. This will result in our live build being more exciting for everyone and drastically reduce the amount of unforeseen issues.”

Bluehole wants to keep players reassured that the game is still on schedule for a full release in 2017, and that this slower pace of updates will be for the benefit of everyone and everything involved with the project. 

“We want to thoroughly and truthfully emphasize that this will have absolutely no bearing on how much content we deliver, or how much we work on the development of the game,” said Bluehole. “We will still inform our community with public patch notes outlining changes we’ve made with each update.”

With PUBG recently passing 600,000 concurrent players on Steam, many people will be waiting for the game’s next update. They should take comfort in the fact that Bluehole is still hard at work behind the scenes, even when the next patch doesn’t come as quickly as they’re used to.