PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds release target pushed back

When Brendan Greene estimated at launch that it would take the team six or seven months to get PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds out of Steam Early Access, he was being overambitious.

Greene always shared this target whenever asked, but in a new statement to PCGamer, the creative director felt that announcing the release window this early may have an adverse effect.

"Over the past few months I have done a lot of interviews, and in many of them, I said we hoped to be out of Early Access six months after we first launched," he said.

"I’ve come to realise that restricting the window to a specific month could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met."

What pushed Greene to say this now was a recent interview published by Rock Paper Shotgun. The interview itself was conducted in April, when Greene had genuinely believed the launch date to be around October.

Now, the studio is targeting a Q4 2017 launch, which would be about two to three months later than originally planned. "So, we have decided that we are going push the full launch back a bit from the initial six-month time frame, but want to assure you that we are still planning a full release before the end of Q4 2017," added Greene.

Still, he wasn't able to commit to a date yet for the same reasons that got him to issue the statement. He also did not touch on the progress of the Xbox One version, so we can assume that it's still on track for a Game Preview launch later this year.