PUBG (franchise)
media franchise
PUBG is a video game franchise owned by the South Korean video game company Krafton. It began with PUBG: Battlegrounds, a 2017 battle royale game developed under the creative direction of Brendan Greene, whose online handle "PlayerUnknown" formed part of the game's original title. The franchise includes the original PC and console title, mobile adaptations, a regional version for India, esports competitions, and story-based media released under the "PUBG Universe" label.
The original game became a major commercial success during early access. By September 2017, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had sold more than ten million copies on Steam after entering early access in March that year. PUBG Mobile, released in 2018, became one of the franchise's largest products, passing one billion accumulated downloads outside China by 2021. Krafton has continued to position PUBG as a long-term intellectual property, with later plans to expand it through additional games, live-service updates, user-generated content, and related media.
Background
PUBG: Battlegrounds developed from Greene's earlier battle royale modifications for existing games. Greene had previously worked on battle royale modes and mods for games including Arma 2, Arma 3, and H1Z1, before joining Bluehole to develop a standalone commercial version of the format. The game entered early access for Windows in March 2017 and received its full Windows release in December 2017.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q140390031. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2018 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “PUBG (franchise)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.