Krafton is the South Korean publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, and its history runs back further than the battle royale boom that made its name. The company was founded in March 2007 in Seongnam, near Seoul, as Bluehole Studio by Chang Byung-gyu, a serial entrepreneur who had already built and sold the search company First Snow to NHN. Bluehole's first release was the MMORPG TERA in 2011, a technically ambitious action MMO that found a long-running audience in Korea, Japan and the West and kept the studio afloat through a difficult decade. In 2015 Bluehole acquired the small Seoul developer Ginno Games, and it was inside that team - renamed Bluehole Ginno Games and later PUBG Corporation - that Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's battle royale concept became PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS. The game's 2017 Early Access run broke Steam's concurrent-player records and turned a mid-sized MMO house into one of the most valuable game companies in Asia.
In November 2018 Bluehole reorganised itself as Krafton, a holding name for a union of studios that kept PUBG Corporation, Bluehole Studio and the mobile team behind PUBG Mobile's Korean and New State releases under one roof, and in December 2020 it folded those subsidiaries into Krafton proper, with PUBG Studios continuing as the internal team that runs Battlegrounds. Krafton listed on the Korea Exchange in August 2021 in one of the country's largest IPOs, then used that capital to broaden well beyond PUBG: it acquired Unknown Worlds, the studio behind Subnautica, in 2021, funded Striking Distance Studios' survival horror The Callisto Protocol in 2022, rescued Tango Gameworks and the Hi-Fi Rush series from closure in 2024, and launched the life simulation inZOI in 2025. Headquartered in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, Krafton today spans live-service shooters, single-player and simulation games across PC, console and mobile, while PUBG: Battlegrounds - free to play since January 2022 - remains the franchise that anchors the company.
