According to reports from South Korea, developer Bluehole has given each of its employees (around 800) an average incentive of 10 million KRW (around 9,000 USD) due to the global success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Announced just before the start of the Korean New Year (similar to Chinese Lunar New Year), the incentive consists of several factors, including a bonus of 4 million KRW (around 3,700 USD), salary increment and more.
Employees of subsidiary PUBG Corp, which oversees development and operations of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, will receive even more undisclosed incentives which Bluehole says will become a new standard in the Korean game industry.
I wrote about the bonus/incentives aspect before when Bluehole announced they were withdrawing their proposed merger with the subsidiary unit which was in charge of PUBG. That was during a time when Bluehole were tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to parlay the unexpected success of PUBG into something longer term.
Additionally, the company was also looking at ways to incentivize their subsidiary units to come up with successes (one of those avenues were bonuses). The whole company would benefit but there was also the desire to make sure bonuses for the subsdiary units would not be diluted for those who came up with successful franchises.
Rather than merge Bluehole Ginno into parent Bluehole, the company dissolved plans for the merger and ended up eventually deciding to rename Bluehole Ginno to PUBG Corp, replace Ginno’s original CEO, and have this corporate entity focus only on PUBG (transferring Bluehole Ginno’s only franchise Devilian to parent Bluehole) to effectively milk this cash cow while the branding iron is still hot.
The above are the fruits of this restructuring where all Bluehole employees reaped the benefits while PUBG Corp employees received additional undisclosed bonuses. What Bluehole in general needs to be wary of is excessive hubris because what goes up, often times has a tendency to go down especially if that hubris goes unchecked.
