Black Budget FAQ

No. PUBG: Black Budget is unreleased. KRAFTON has run three closed tests on Steam — December 2025, April 2026 and June 2026 — but has not announced a release date.

No release date has been announced. The Steam listing shows “To be announced”, and KRAFTON has given no launch window, price or early-access plan. Any specific date circulating online is speculation or a storefront placeholder.

PC only, via Steam, and the listing specifies Windows 11. No PlayStation or Xbox version has been announced — it has not been ruled out, simply never mentioned in official material.

The business model has not been announced. KRAFTON has published no price, no free-to-play confirmation and no monetisation details. Closed test access has been free, but that says nothing about the retail release.

Not unless a closed test is running, and none currently is. Access has only ever come through the Request Access button on the official Steam page, with KRAFTON selecting participants. There is no purchasable version.

Sign in to Steam, open the official PUBG: Black Budget store page, and select Request Access when a test is open. Selection is at KRAFTON's discretion rather than first-come, and requesting does not guarantee a place.

Sometimes. During the June 2026 alpha, accepted players could invite up to two Steam friends whose friendship was at least 30 days old. PUBG Studios noted invites might be disabled under server strain, so it was possible but not guaranteed.

No. No legitimate key exists. Access is granted directly to a Steam account and appears in that account's library, so there is nothing to resell. Any site selling keys, alpha bundles or guaranteed access is a scam.

The minimum specification lists Windows 11, an Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GB RAM, an NVIDIA RTX 2060 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6600, and 30 GB of storage. The recommended tier lists an i5-12400 or Ryzen 5 5600 with an RTX 3070 or RX 6800.

It is a tactical PvPvE extraction shooter, not a battle royale. You enter a raid with gear you are willing to lose, collect loot while fighting players and AI, and win by reaching an extraction point alive rather than by being the last squad standing.

PUBG: Battlegrounds is a battle royale with one winner per match and no progress carried between matches. Black Budget is an extraction shooter where multiple squads can succeed in the same raid, loot persists between sessions, and dying costs you everything you carried in.

Up to 45 players per session, organized into squads of up to 3 players — up to 15 teams on the map at once.

Up to 30 minutes per raid. The session is time-boxed, and the Anomaly shrinks the playable area as the clock runs down.

Both. It is PvPvE — rival player squads and hostile AI entities occupy the island simultaneously, and official material states difficulty scales with player level and time spent inside the loop.

You lose everything carried into and found during that raid — gear, weapons, consumables and artifacts. Progress stored outside the raid, such as your Base, character skills and stashed equipment, is not affected.

The Anomaly is a supernatural phenomenon that has trapped Coli Island in a time loop. Mechanically it is a predictable, shrinking hazard zone that compresses the playable map as a raid progresses — comparable in function to PUBG's Blue Zone.

SAPIENS is the classified black-budget programme at the centre of the game's story. Contractors are hired to recover technology tied to it from an abandoned research facility on Coli Island. KRAFTON has confirmed the name and the framing but not explained what the programme actually is.

One map is confirmed: Coli Island, a 2.5 × 2.5 km open-world island with varied biomes, points of interest and underground facilities. No additional maps have been announced.

It is designed as an FPP-first experience according to official material. No third-person mode has been promised, but none has been explicitly ruled out either.

Progression is persistent and sits outside the raid: an expandable Base with crafting stations, stash upgrades and income facilities, a research station, character skills and proficiencies, three rival factions offering contracts and reputation rewards, and extensive weapon and gear customization.

Their names have not been published. Official material confirms three rival factions exist and offer contracts and reputation-based rewards, but no faction has been named. Any faction names circulating are unsourced.

Both are first-person extraction shooters with persistent loot and harsh death penalties. The clearest difference is structural: Black Budget caps raids at 30 minutes and forces contact with a shrinking hazard zone, where Tarkov raids run longer and apply less directed pressure. Balance comparisons are premature since Black Budget is unreleased.

No numeric weapon statistics are published anywhere, including here. KRAFTON has not released damage, recoil, fire rate or magazine data, and the community armories state the same. Weapon pages list the class, ammunition and source, and mark every unpublished value as unpublished rather than estimating it.

Because the number does not exist in any source we can point to. This database only lists facts traceable to an official or clearly-labelled community source. Filling a layout with plausible-looking figures would make every other claim on the site harder to trust.

Official means stated by KRAFTON or PUBG Studios in a public source. Playtest data means observed directly in a public, NDA-free test. Community reported means circulated by community sources without official confirmation. Unverified means circulating with no traceable source at all.

No. This is an unofficial fan-made database and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by KRAFTON, Inc. or PUBG Studios. All game data is sourced from public materials and cited accordingly.

Use the contact page. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page rather than quietly edited away, so a fixed mistake stays visible along with what it replaced.