…called Striking Distance. Seriously? Really???? Ok, I actually should not be surprised considering some of the other things they have tried before.
Striking Distance is a wholly owned subsidiary of PUBG Corporation which itself, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Krafton. And as per the above intro, the goal of this new studio is to expand the “original narrative experience of the PUBG Universe” which can be construed as creating story mode games based on PUBG (since Striking Distance will be the publisher of such games).
I guess this is Krafton’s “solution” to trying to expand the PUBG franchise and IP beyond its battle royale roots since this licensing of their franchises has been a goal of Krafton for several years now. They failed with trying to make noise about copyright infringement claims against Fortnite BR for example. The licensing angle was something they originally tried with Devilian (no real takers) and then expanded to TERA (with most of the efforts focusing on mobile versions of the game for which Krafton ended up acquiring at least two of the previously independent studios). The difference is that TERA at least has some lore as defined by the original designers (and has subsequently been screwed up by different teams over the past few years).
Pouring money into designing and developing PC MMO’s is no longer the thing though (and mobile versions tend to be an offshoot of what exists in the PC space and have inherent limitations due to form factor considerations (touch based screens being the biggest). So Krafton has been looking for the next “secret sauce” and are looking at expanding their offerings (turn based RPG MISTOVER being one of the ones in the works along with mobile Project BB).
The problem that I see is that PUBG doesn’t really have much to go on besides a cast iron pan, weekend warrior/combat casual cosmetic (which again aren’t very uniquely themed), and an already common phrase coined a long time ago (winner winner chicken dinner) for which they filed a lawsuit against the Chinese ministry for rejecting a trademark request based on the Chinese translation of that phrase. I suppose there is always a starting point (even if it needs to be retroactively applied). And since PUBG Corp has money to burn (and an unlimited amount of feces to fling), they might as well try to see what will stick. All I know is this is yet another attempt to try to parlay the unintended success of PUBG into something which can be leveraged long term for which the revenues can be used to fund other projects.
