Krafton plans for PUBG to be more than a battle royale, says Subnautica 2 drama proves its quality control is working

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PUBG: Battlegrounds. Screenshot: PUBG Corp., Krafton

Krafton is looking to transform its popular PUBG battle royale game into something broader

The Korean publisher reminded investors today that is preparing to upgrade PUBG to Unreal Engine 5. Unreal, of course, is the gaming tech built by Epic, maker of PUBG competitor Fortnite.

And with that tech comes ambitions that sound like Krafton would like to do more to match Fortnite.

“In the age of PUBG 2.0, it will not simply be a battle royale game per se,” the company’s chief financial officer, Dongkeun Bae, told investors during a quarterly earnings call today.

PUBG will become “a gameplay platform,” he said.

He added: “We are developing wide-ranging modes under that objective.”

This tracks with Epic’s own push to turn Fortnite from a game widely used as a battle royale to one that functions as a platform that also encompasses a Lego game, a music game and a host of user-made creations.

Publishers with the biggest live-service offerings badly want to turn their mega-games into platforms, to keep players immersed in their product, even if they’re playing different games inside it (see also: Roblox).

PUBG is consistently one of the top games on Steam, having peaked at just over 700,000 players today. Mobile versions of the game are popular worldwide.

PUBG’s switch to Unreal has been teased by Krafton since early 2024, though there’s no date for its completion. Bae said the company has been “speeding up the development process” to make the shift to Unreal.

The company also wants to enable its players to make their own user-generated riffs on PUBG, another echo of Epic’s Fortnite strategy.

Some of Krafton’s plans for PUBG for the rest of the year from today’s presentation to investors.

A Subnautica 2 clarification from the CFO

During the same quarterly earnings call today, Krafton executives were careful to not say too much about the ongoing dispute over Subnautica 2 and the ousted founders of that game’s Krafton-owned studio Unknown Worlds. Executives restated the company’s position that it fired the studio’s three long-time leaders due to a dispute over whether Subnautica 2 was going to have enough content for an early access 2025 launch. (The fired founders disagree, say the company wanted to avoid paying them a bonus tied to launch earnings and have sued.)

An analyst today asked the Krafton execs whether the issues around Subnautica 2 indicated that Krafton was struggling to keep internal projects on track, a worrying sign given the company’s growing ambitions.

CFO Dongkeun Bae want to address that assumption.