PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is being officially rebranded as PUBG: Battlegrounds.
The name change was first noticed by PC Gamer, who reported that the game's splash screen and store pages had been changed from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to PUBG: Battlegrounds sometime in July.
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It's not clear when exactly this change took place, but PC Gamer points out that there are still remnants of PlayerUnknown in the store page descriptions, and hints at the original title when trying to buy the game. The removal of PlayerUnknown from the title indicates that Krafton is trying to steer away from the original creator, despite PlayerUnknown still being a part of the PUBG acronym.
All of this is especially interesting considering that Brendan Greene, also known as PlayerUnknown, essentially nuked their Twitter account earlier in the week, removing all mentions of PUBG and Prologue, the game they'd been working on since leaving Krafton back in 2019. This is also following rumours that state that PUBG is going free-to-play, which would align with the sudden rebrand of the game.
PC Gamer reached out to Krafton's PR to ask about the rebranding, where it said, "Krafton is actively expanding the PUBG brand through a variety of new experiences set in its universe. Rebranding PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to PUBG: Battlegrounds is the first step in us realizing this vision. Additional titles in the franchise will carry the PUBG name, as you see with our upcoming game, PUBG: New State."
PUBG has several spin-offs in the works currently, and from what Krafton has said here it seems like they'll all come under the PUBG umbrella. Curiously, it doesn't make reference to the Callisto Protocol, the upcoming horror game set in the PUBG universe.
The rebranding here is particularly funny for several reasons. For starters, players have already been calling the game PUBG for about as long as it's been popular, so rebranding it so many years later feels a little tone-deaf. It also simply doesn't make a lot of sense, considering that PUBG is an acronym for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. That means that the new title is now technically PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds; Battlegrounds.
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