PUBG drives Krafton's "record" sales for start of 2023's fiscal year

Krafton's 2023 fiscal year is already off to a good start, and it's once again thanks to PUBG: Battlegrounds. In its newest financial report, the South Korean publisher said the game's performance contributed to what was called "record quarterly sales" of 538.7 billion KRW, or $407.8 million. 

Compared to the previous year, that's an upgrade of 3 percent, and up by 13.7 percent from the previous quarter. Net profit for the company hit 267.2 billion KRW, resulting in a net profit margin of 50 percent. 

PUBG turned six years old in December 2022, and the shooter's in-game sales were said to have reached an all-time high across both PC and console. According to Krafton, PC sales grew respectively by 28 (quarterly) and 68 (yearly) percent. In total, that contributed to 33 percent of PUBG sales for the quarter. 

The mobile version of PUBG is also said to have "experienced growth," though Krafton didn't provide any specifics. In August 2022, the developer had no problem bragging about the success of PUBG Mobile, but was vague on the game's performance since then. 

Likewise, there's no real mention in Krafton's report of either Striking Distance Studios' horror romp The Callisto Protocol or Unknown Worlds' Moonbreaker. The latter released in Early Access in September of last year, while Callisto came towards the tail end of 2022. 

The future of Krafton

Looking to the future, Krafton said it plans to expand as a game publisher by "discovering creativity and scaling growth through self-developed games and minority stake investments." One way it aims to do this is by creating a virtual organization to "better support the 24 project pipelines under development within its ecosystem."

There's also a mention of researching deep learning technologies to help shorten game development time, but again, the statement is brief and vague. The big thing of note is that Krafton's deep learning division has published papers on its findings and started "implementing technologies that enable cooperative play within games."

As for PUBG, Krafton says it'll continue to build on the game's momentum by increasing its "monetization efficiency" in 2023's second quarter.  The game will have new skins for players to buy, along with more brand collaborations that'll be in the vein of previous crossovers like Marvel and Netflix.