PUBG Corporation is the Seoul-based studio that built PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS and, with it, turned battle royale from a mod scene into a genre. Its roots are in Ginno Games, a small Korean developer founded in 2009 by Kim Chang-han that Bluehole acquired in 2015 and renamed Bluehole Ginno Games. The following year the studio hired Brendan Greene - the Irish designer known online as PlayerUnknown, whose ARMA mods and work on H1Z1's King of the Kill had defined the last-man-standing format - as creative director, and gave a team of a few dozen developers roughly a year to build a standalone game around his ideas. PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS entered Steam Early Access on March 23, 2017, sold in the millions within weeks, and left Early Access on December 21, 2017 having already set the all-time Steam record for concurrent players, a mark above three million that still stands. Bluehole spun the team out as PUBG Corporation in 2017 to run the game as its own company, with Kim Chang-han as CEO.
The studio spent the following years turning a breakout hit into a long-running service: new maps from the desert of Miramar and the jungle of Sanhok to the snowfields of Vikendi, the Survivor Pass seasons, console releases on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and the PUBG Mobile and PUBG Lite spin-offs that carried the brand to hundreds of millions of players. It also fought the game's two persistent problems, cheating and a reputation for rough performance, with successive anti-cheat and engine overhauls. In December 2020 parent company Krafton merged PUBG Corporation into itself, and the team continues as PUBG Studios, the internal Krafton studio that still runs Battlegrounds today - including the January 2022 move to free to play that reset the game's player counts upward. For players, the studio's catalogue is essentially one game and its offshoots, but it is the game that every other battle royale is measured against.
