Part of this is pretty much Bluehole in a nutshell. I’ve blogged about this several times already but I will just put the summary of it here in a nutshell. PUBG was an unexpected success during early access. PUBG Corp was still known as Bluehole Ginno at the time. They had gotten nowhere with Devilian and Devilian Mobile; long run on sentence incoming – (shutdown in Korea in just a little over an year, launched in Thailand in May 2015 but left the publisher there without new content from November 2015 until their publishing contract expired in May 2018), launched in NA/EU by Trion in December 2015; like a partnership of bad and worse where Trion turned it into a cash grab, got rid of most of their team by July 2016, and trickled remaining content out until May 2017 where the game was left in autopilot mode since by that time, PUBG was funding Bluehole Ginno and parent Bluehole). Devilian Mobile was backed with a massive worldwide marketing campaign by GAMEVIL but lasted just around an year before it was shutdown in November 2017.
As for PUBG’s unexpected success, Bluehole began tripping over themselves and initially proposed a merger between the parent corporation and Bluehole Ginno to occur around July 2017. They nixed that idea and instead renamed Bluehole Ginno to PUBG Corp, got rid of the original CEO, named the co-founder (and executive producer for Devilian as the new CEO; Chang Han Kim) so that it could solely focus on PUBG.
Devilian had tried going to intellectual property route to get other companies interested in the idea of its “human-devil transformation”. The franchise also leveraged a lot of assets and some tech from TERA (which if people remember history as to how Bluehole Studio’s came about; was when the NCsoft team that was handling Lineage III, bailed and decided to create their own studio aka Bluehole Studio – and they ended up using intellectual property from NCsoft and Lineage III to create TERA where they even defied a court injunction landing some execs and members of the dev team some jail time). So the company has always had this sketchy past (majority of those folks are no longer associated with the current day Bluehole).
That is likely where PUBG Corp had that idea of protecting their so called intellectual property with PUBG (publicly expressing their concerns regarding plagiarism in Fortnite) eventually leading to that copyright lawsuit against Epic Games in South Korea which they dropped a month later. Bluehole in general was never a major player in Korea (besides TERA) or anywhere else prior to PUBG and they really haven’t gotten a grip on how to manage this success. They opened up a nice swanky office for PUBG Corp in Seoul and then began opening up offices around the world as they really believe they can parlay PUBG into something bigger (when they haven’t even gotten a handle the issues plaguing it). That isn’t surprising though (the issues aspect). TERA has a ton of optimization issues. Their MMO they have been working on since 2014 for Kakao (Ascent: Infinite Realm) which will launch in 2019 will have similar optimization issues (you already see it in the original launch trailer with client FPS drops; and this is a title meant to have large scale aerial RvR).
Now they are tasked to address all the issues in PUBG which led to that whole “Fix PUBG” campaign. The whole notion of PUBG is somewhat not a natural one in South Korea where most designers cut their teeth on MMORPG’s. That is why they had to hire a lot of developers from elsewhere like Europe for example. And I can imagine the corporate disconnect between the Korean heads and everyone else. The company has never been able to optimize TERA which of course is not helped by having developed it on a much older build of Unreal Engine 3. PUBG has a slight advantage using Unreal Engine 4 but they still couldn’t even optimize their game clients on PC and console with that advantage (netcode still needs to be tweaked based on design for example).
So it’s not surprising to see them stumbling around managing this title and being somewhat out of touch for several months after coming out of early access since they were pre-occupied watching the money roll in. They don’t have a monopoly or even a whole lot of intellectual property they can leverage with PUBG though. So in their case, what goes up, can really come crashing down hard (which is what makes this clip while comedic, oh so true).
