Video games & franchises
KoreaVideo games & franchises
Krafton (크래프톤)
The publisher of PUBG, the game that invented the battle royale as a mass genre.
- Founded
- 2007
- Headquarters
- Seoul, South Korea
- Sector
- Video game publishing
- Flagship product
- PUBG: Battlegrounds
Krafton, then Bluehole, was a struggling MMORPG studio when it recruited Brendan Greene in 2016, an Irishman who tinkered with battle royale modes for other games. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds shipped in early access in 2017 and sold seventy million copies on PC.
The format — a hundred players, a shrinking map, one survivor — was immediately picked up by Fortnite, Call of Duty and Apex Legends. The mobile version, developed with Tencent, counts over a billion downloads and dominates competitive play in India and South-East Asia, where it has been repeatedly banned on political grounds.
In the magazine
Articles that cover this topic.