Bluehole had previously planned to merge with their Bluehole Ginno subsidiary (which PUBG’s creator Brendan Greene was hired as the creative director for since the Ginno subsidiary was also the one Bluehole was going to use for creating/marketing global franchises) due to PUBG’s greater than anticipated success but annulled it in order to maintain a separate corporate structure (for maximum business efficiency/operations). This new corporate entity will also be more flexible to other business partnerships (like China’s Tencent being interested in investing/partnering with Bluehole/PUBG Corp) or PUBG becoming an eSport.
Additionally, the other core objective that Bluehole wanted to achieve with some of their franchises was the whole notion of global IP (intellectual property) and franchises. Bluehole Ginno’s CEO originally tried to achieve this with Devilian Mobile (utilizing Devilian IP) in terms of making the whole human form/devil form transformation, a selling point which others could license (this all came on the heels of the failure of the PC MMO version of Devilian which ceased service in Korea in September 2015 when Bluehole Ginno refocused resources on Devilian Mobile).
According to this Bloomberg article, Bluehole’s market capitalization is up 5-fold over the last 3 months ($4.6 billion) due to PUBG’s success on Steam Early Access. While Bluehole is privately held (the CEO holds 20% of those shares while the rest is made up of venture capitalists and private investors), there are sites/companies that dig into those details including as much financial details as possible.
Bluehole wants to capitalize on that success by being able to leverage whatever intellectual property and franchise rights they are able to either copyright, trademark/tradename, patent (they will have a case if they have properly documented the expression of idea angle) in order to maintain a revenue stream via royalties. This is one of the reasons Bluehole made some recent noise regarding Epic Games Fortnite Battle Royale mode in relation to the fact that Bluehole licenses Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 for PUBG. I personally don’t see how that is an issue unless both companies signed a non-compete clause.
The Bloomberg article also makes a good point: “Bluehole and Greene have no experience managing games at PUBG’s scale and have already botched communication several times.” As I wrote before, TERA has been successful for Bluehole but that’s an MMO with a very specific aesthetic and style that does not have as wide ranging appeal as a survivor mode style shooter. And even with TERA’s worldwide success when it came to revenues, Bluehole didn’t really heavily reinvest those profits back into the game. I see the exact same thing happening with PUBG but unlike TERA, any other shooter/survival mode game that comes onto the scene which does it better/have some other twist to it, will have PUBG players moving on very quickly. And Bluehole knows that.
The way Bluehole internally has tried to find ways to now parlay PUBG’s wilder than expected success into something long term, comes across as completely amateurish though (that includes the initial kneejerk to merge with Bluehole Ginno). I personally have a hard time seeing how they will parlay this into a huge revenue stream though because as mentioned before, the majority of the idea’s in this game and genre have already been done before (prior art). Bluehole is just trying to leverage the current (and very fleeting) popularity of PUBG into something more long term given the commonality of “one hit wonders”.
Finally, as to what will actually happen with the Bluehole Ginno subsidiary now, that remains to be seen since all active design/development of Devilian (PC MMO) ended in early 2016 after they decided not to pursue relaunching the service in Korea (instead choosing to refocus on shipping Devilian Mobile for GAMEVIL). Their Thai publisher ended active marketing and listing of the game back in June 2016 (game service running in maintenance mode) while Trion Worlds has been operating the game with a skeleton staff (the usual 3 month window for announcing some type of content update passed back in August).
Devilian Mobile itself has not been updated since April 2017 and as noted before, the whole notion of licensing out the Devilian IP (human/devil form transformation) went nowhere (and was also not included in PUBG). GAMEVIL has also moved on (now pushing ArcheAge Begins which is a mobile version of ArcheAge).
