PUBGs vekst kom fra alt unntatt Battle Royale

Krafton's second quarter report puts the PUBG intellectual property up 25 percent in revenue across the first half of 2026 against the same stretch last year, and the company's overall operating profit at a record 410.9 billion KRW, roughly £213 million, a 67 percent jump year on year. PUBG stopped being a headline generator years ago while quietly holding a place in Steam's five most played games.

The split underneath that number is the interesting part. Krafton's PC segment revenue grew 155.1 percent year on year and console 143.3 percent, while mobile managed 5.5 percent. All three PUBG products grew, the PC game, PUBG Mobile and Battlegrounds Mobile India, and the publisher credits collaborations and new modes rather than the battle royale itself. On PC that means the co-op PvE mode Xeno Point and a Payday crossover, with more of both promised for the back half of the year. On mobile it means user-generated content under the World of Wonder banner, a creative suite in the same territory as Roblox and Fortnite.

"Krafton will upgrade its creation tools and expand UGC built on global IPs"

— Krafton

Naruto and Spider-Man were the examples given, alongside a new in-game currency for creator rewards. Battle royale was never my genre, so the line I keep rereading is that a battle royale company's growth arrived through the parts of its portfolio that are not battle royale.

Xeno Point is the clearest version of that, and not even the first attempt, since a Skibidi Toilet collaboration got there before it. It launched 8 April on Steam and 16 April on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as a mode kept entirely separate from the main game, closer to a standalone product living inside Battlegrounds. Four players load into a futuristic hub, spend resources on a large skill tree, upgrade ultimate-style abilities, craft, and pick gear before a run. The guns are the familiar PUBG arsenal with attachments and backpacks intact, plus an anti-alien weapon, except every weapon now comes in colour-coded rarity variants carrying percentage buffs, which is the looter-shooter apparatus bolted onto a shooter that never had it.

Squads hold capture points against waves, clear a sub-boss and finish on a mission boss across four difficulty tiers. Eurogamer's preview back in April found the top tier manageable even with unoptimised gear and barely a look at the skill tree, with the caveat that two of the four players in that squad worked at PUBG Studios, and found the bestiary thin: scuttling melee robots, self-destructing versions of the same, humanoid stand-and-shoot units, ones that hand out invincibility shields, and a boss that stands still with small weak points to hit. The map came off worst, described as a loot funnel that sluices players toward a piñata at the end. The verdict was that it works as a palate cleanser between battle royale rounds and not much more. PUBG's early maps were among the best places in multiplayer games, so reading that Miramar has been straightened into a corridor bothers me more than any complaint about the enemies.

The other half of the earnings story is a game Krafton spent a year fighting its own developers over. Subnautica 2 passed 5 million sales 22 days after its 14 May early access launch on PC and Xbox Series X/S, and the Subnautica series brought in 232.5 billion KRW, around £121 million, in the first half of Krafton's financial year. The publisher now says it plans to keep the game serviced through full launch and to build Subnautica into a franchise IP.

Getting there was ugly. Krafton bought Unknown Worlds in 2021, then last year removed studio founder Charlie Cleveland, chief executive Ted Gill and special projects director Max McGuire while pushing early access out of its announced 2025 window into 2026, a move that would have missed the revenue targets unlocking a promised $250 million bonus for the team. The Subnautica 2 lawsuit drama that followed included the allegation that Krafton's CEO asked ChatGPT to brainstorm ways to avoid paying it. A Delaware judge found Krafton had breached its Equity Purchase Agreement by terminating the three without valid cause and by improperly seizing operational control, and reinstated Gill, who later stepped down under a settlement that extended bonuses to every current Unknown Worlds employee rather than just the three executives and the staff present at acquisition. Gill told Bloomberg the terms left staff compensated significantly more than the original agreement required.

I think the sharpest sentence in this earnings report is the one calling Subnautica a franchise IP, because it is the same game a leaked internal review said lacked the freshness and volume expected of a sequel. That review, which Krafton confirmed was real, counted two fewer biomes than planned, a missing leviathan-class creature, a scrapped mode, a cut vehicle and roughly six hours of delayed story. Cleveland said publicly it was ready to ship. Five million buyers in three weeks is not a verdict on who was right about the content, but it is a number that makes the delay harder to justify in retrospect. Unknown Worlds expects to stay in early access for two to three years, and has said no generative AI went into the game, which sits awkwardly beside Krafton declaring itself an AI-first company in October 2025.

Around those two results, the rest of the portfolio has been busy in both directions. PUBG Esports in 2026 was rebuilt into a season running March to December, with four circuits of three consecutive series producing 12 PGS events, 24 teams at each split evenly between global partner teams and regional qualifiers, and a total PGS prize pool of $2 million, $100,000 for each of the first two series in a circuit and $300,000 for the final. Three internationals sit on top of that, the PUBG Nations Cup in June, an Esports World Cup appearance in July and the PUBG Global Championship in December. Partner teams share $1 million in annual support, and the in-game side adds an updated Pick'em Challenge, an Esports Fantasy League and an Esports Pass.

PUBG: Blindspot, the top-down 5v5 tactical shooter from Krafton's ARC Team, was pulled from Steam on 30 March after 53 days in early access, having peaked at 3,251 concurrent players and fallen to 184 in the day the shutdown was announced. The team stayed together, and Krafton said the work would inform future projects. The next swing is PUBG: Black Budget, an extraction shooter running its first alpha from 12 to 22 December, built around a 2.5 by 2.5 kilometre island caught in a time loop, up to 45 players in squads of three, raids running up to 30 minutes, and every piece of loot lost on death. Its Steam page already lists recommended specs of a 12th-generation Core i3, 16GB of memory and an RTX 3060, with the alpha build at roughly 30GB.

Put together, the report describes a company that grew by turning one battle royale into a platform for other genres while its biggest single success came from a studio it had been trying to slow down. Xeno Point moved the PC line, Subnautica 2 moved the balance sheet, Blindspot moved nothing, and Black Budget is the one still to be tested.

Read also: Krafton soft launched Astro Arena: 3vs3 Battle PvP on 9 July across India, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil and the United States, a PUBG Studios MOBA with roguelike upgrades and matches built to last around five minutes. It began life in India as TARASONA: Battle Royale during a 2024 early access run before being rebranded and taken into alpha in 2025.