Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Krafton makes video games, most famously the battle royale hit PUBG, and earns money selling copies of its games and in-game items.
Krafton is a South Korean video game company, and it is best known for one thing: PUBG, the battle royale shooter where 100 players parachute onto an island and fight until only one person or squad is left standing. That single game turned a small studio into one of the most profitable game companies in the world. The company is headquartered in Seoul, and its games are played all over the planet.
Here is how the money works. Krafton sells the game itself on PCs and consoles, and it sells cosmetic items — skins, outfits, weapon finishes — that players buy to look cool. The real cash machine is the free-to-play mobile version, PUBG Mobile, which costs nothing to download but makes money from millions of small in-game purchases. Krafton also licenses the PUBG brand to Chinese game giant Tencent, which operates the Chinese version of the game. That partnership is huge for Krafton's profits but also a vulnerability, since it depends on one partner in one giant market. Krafton has been trying hard not to be a one-game company. It publishes other titles like The Callisto Protocol and various mobile games, and it has invested in studios and new projects, including in India, where PUBG Mobile was banned by the government in 2020 and later relaunched as BGMI. The company went public on the Korea Exchange in 2021 in one of the country's biggest-ever IPOs, and it has used its cash pile to buy stakes in game studios and invest in artificial intelligence and new entertainment ventures.
The bet is simple to understand: can Krafton turn PUBG's enormous audience into more than one game? A battle royale hit can fade, and players are famously fickle. Krafton's challenge is building the next big thing before the current one cools off, while squeezing as much as it can from the franchise it already owns.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026