PUBG Founder Could Become a Billionaire

Kim Chang-han, a former child computer prodigy who won national coding competitions in South Korea in the 1980s, had reached his lowest point. It was 2014, and he’d just laid off a third of the employees at his gaming startup. Since 2000, he’d created three multiplayer online games at three startups that all fell flat.

Then his fortunes began to change.

Bluehole Inc., as Krafton was called at the time, released PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, in 2017. It became one of the most successful games of all time, with the PC and console versions selling more than 70 million copies and the mobile version being downloaded about 600 million times, according to Krafton.

Now the company is planning an initial public offering in mid-to-late 2021 that could be South Korea’s biggest in years. The share sale could raise billions of dollars, Kim, who became Krafton’s chief executive officer last year, said in an interview in Seoul, declining to give further details.

The IPO could value the startup at as much as 30 trillion won ($27.2 billion), according to a Jan. 5 report by Eugene Investment & Securities Co.

Krafton, whose name represents a commitment to craftsmanship, manages four game studios but PUBG accounts for the vast majority of its sales and profits, according to Kim. It had revenue of more than $1.1 billion in the nine months ended September, according to a company filing.

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