PUBG: Battlegrounds hit 1.34 million concurrent players in March this year. That is not a game in decline. Yet its IP boss is sitting in a Seoul office, talking about Fortnite with genuine admiration, and mapping out a future that looks a lot like the game that once "borrowed" everything PUBG built.
Taeseok Jang, head of Krafton's PUBG IP franchise group, recently laid out his thinking on where battle royale goes from here. The short version: more game modes, more brand deals, more user-generated content, and a respectful nod to the rival that spent years being accused of copying PUBG's homework.
From lawsuit to looking glass
The history between PUBG and Fortnite is not exactly warm. Krafton filed a lawsuit against Epic Games over the battle royale format, a legal battle that eventually went nowhere. Now, Jang is describing Fortnite as a model worth studying, not fighting.
"I have a big respect for them, and I just feel like they're doing great," he said. That is a striking line from the head of the franchise that once tried to sue Epic into backing off.
Here's the thing: the admiration is not blind. Fortnite's own situation is complicated. Epic raised V-Bucks prices in March, laid off over 1,000 developers, and its own executives have acknowledged that playtime dropped considerably through 2025. Statista estimates Epic's gross revenue at around $6 billion for 2025, which sounds healthy until you factor in the scale of those cuts. The game "still remains the biggest game in the world on many fronts," in the words of Epic's Steve Allison, but the trajectory has raised questions.
Jang sees that context and still points to Fortnite's structure as the right direction. The key here is that he is not admiring Fortnite's numbers so much as its model: a game that became a platform, with varied content, rotating modes, and brand partnerships layered on top of a core gameplay loop that players keep returning to.
The platform play PUBG is building toward
PUBG: Battlegrounds has already been running collabs with Balenciaga, Lamborghini, and K-pop group Blackpink. The recently released Xeno Point added a PvE looter-shooter roguelite mode to the mix. A partnership with Payday, combining PUBG's mechanics with Starbreeze's structure, is scheduled for later this year. Jang also flagged potential for TV shows, animations, and cartoons built on the PUBG license.
That is, functionally, the Fortnite playbook. And Jang does not shy away from saying so.
"You have to have different, varied content and different game modes in order to survive as a long-term service," he said. "And I think it's not just PUBG or Fortnite, or different companies or different IPs."
The irony is not lost on him either. When asked about the cycle of PUBG influencing Fortnite and now Fortnite influencing PUBG's strategy, Jang pointed out that this is just how the market works. He framed it less as borrowing and more as industry-wide convergence on what actually keeps players engaged long-term.
What most players miss about battle royale's staying power
Jang's broader argument is that battle royale as a genre has a structural advantage over other live-service games. The format can absorb a large player pool, offers a distinct gameplay experience that other genres do not replicate, and provides a foundation that brand events and extra modes can sit on top of without breaking the core loop.
"What PUBG and Fortnite are really good at is having their own uniqueness in gameplay," he said, pointing to that core content as the reason both games can keep offering varied experiences without losing their identity.
Extraction shooters like Arc Raiders and Marathon are generating significant hype right now, and the genre shift is real. But Jang is not reading that as a threat to battle royale so much as a reminder that the genre needs to keep evolving rather than coasting.
PUBG sitting at 1.34 million concurrent players in March gives Krafton a solid base to work from. The question now is whether the platform strategy actually delivers the next phase of growth Jang is confident exists. For players, that means more modes, more collabs, and a game that increasingly looks less like a single battle royale and more like a persistent world with a battle royale at its center. Make sure to check out more:
