Seoul, Dec 6: South Korean gamemaker Krafton said on Friday it will host a global esports competition for its smash-hit battle royale title, PUBG: Battlegrounds, set to kick off next week. The PUBG Global Championship (PGC) 2024 will take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from Monday to December 22, according to the Korean company. PGC is the final event and the World Championship of this year's competitive season for Battlegrounds.
The base prize pool is $1.5 million, with an additional 25 per cent of the revenue from commemorative item sales at the event to be distributed to the participating teams based on their final standings, reports Yonhap news agency. A total of 24 teams from around the world will compete in the event, including three teams from South Korea and four teams from the American continent.
Meanwhile, Krafton's third-quarter operating income exceeded market expectations on the continued popularity of its global-hit game title, PUBG: Battlegrounds. The company earlier reported an operating profit of 324.4 billion won ($233.9 million) for the July-September period, up 71.4 per cent from a year earlier, beating market expectations by more than 27 per cent.
The average estimate of operating profit by analysts stood at 254.8 billion won, according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency. For the first nine months of the year, Krafton's cumulative operating profit amounted to 967 billion won with its sales surpassing 2 trillion won, both of which have already exceeded full-year figures from last year.
The company's Q3 net profit, however, dropped 42.6 percent on-year to 121.4 billion won due to what it has called non-operating losses from currency fluctuations. "The constant popularity of Battlegrounds contributed to the stellar performance in sales and operating profit in the third quarter," a company official said, referring to the company's smash hit battle royal video game.