Case study: what is behind PUBG’s success?

Updated on October 18, 2026: reviewed and updated figures.

Case study: what is behind PUBG’s success?

Over the past few years, PUBG has achieved impressive success both internationally and in Vietnam, thanks to the right moves at the right time and a well-judged PUBG marketing strategy. So what exactly made PUBG succeed? Let’s find out with Adtek in the article below.

How PUBG came about

Before 2017, Battle Royale was still a small genre, and it mostly existed in the form of mods that players developed by themselves.

At the time, Battle Royale games were either made in-house by game developers over a short period, or produced by companies like Bluehole that had no previous experience with shooters of any kind. In its early days, PUBG was little more than a script, an idea that seemed rather unrealistic. Brendan Greene, the creator of the Battle Royale genre, came on board and was given a sizable budget to build a polished, visually appealing video game. Most importantly, the barriers to entering the market, which had been a major obstacle a few years earlier, were gone, and the market was ripe for a quality product to take over.

PUBG’s development goals

PUBG Mobile is a classic battle royale game played and loved by millions of gamers around the world. As competition among battle royale titles heated up, PUBG Mobile looked for ways to grow its community: by reaching the right target segments and by making sure PUBG Mobile stayed top of mind for its audience. PUBG’s campaign set out to get every existing player, and even people who did not play games at all, to pay attention to the game, join in and play PUBG Mobile, so that engagement with the brand would grow quickly.

PUBG also had specific goals, such as:

• Raising awareness of PUBG Mobile and growing the number of new users.
• Creating engaging, memorable content that would resonate with the target audience and therefore be more likely to be shared widely.
• Generating 35 million social media engagements (the goal of the PUBG Mobile launch campaign in North America in 2018, according to Shorty Awards, 2019).

Insight

Interaction

2020 was a turning point for the games market, as gaming shifted from a niche experience (reserved for gamers) to a mainstream one (popular with players worldwide). At the same time, the pandemic cut people off from social contact, and they could no longer meet as often as before. The need to interact and stay connected suddenly became a problem that had to be solved quickly. Games became the gamers’ choice because they offer entertainment, help relieve stress and train concentration. On top of that, gaming offered a safe way to stay connected and interact during social distancing. Online games and esports titles let players of all ages connect and play together in a virtual world.

Back to PUBG. Seeing that the need for interaction kept rising, PUBG put more focus on how players could connect with one another in real time. And because PUBG was designed as a team-based survival game that brings players together, it built and adjusted the ways players could interact socially. Specifically, players can use features PUBG provides, such as online chat, voice communication, inviting friends and playing with them, and playing with other players, to stay in touch and discuss strategy together.

When playing in a team, players usually prefer to choose their own teammates rather than rely on the matchmaking system. So PUBG lets gamers form teams as they wish, making sure they end up with teammates they click with. Team members can work together, chat easily and understand one another when planning tactics in a survival game. You could say that the success of any action depends on the joint, cooperative effort of all the individuals involved.

Challenge

Whatever game they choose, players expect to face challenges, and with PUBG, gamers also want to take on challenges when playing this survival genre. Players look forward to tests and enjoy the feeling of overcoming difficulties. That is why PUBG is seen as a game that is not only entertaining but also makes players think up the right strategies to get past each challenge.

For example, before you enter combat, you need to find a landing spot with plenty of weapons and gear. If you land somewhere crowded, you will face a fierce fight, because many people will be trying to eliminate you. Every action in the game needs to be considered and weighed so that players can complete the challenge more easily.

Another challenge players may run into is losing teammates during a fight. Although Squad mode gives players a better gaming experience, they also need to think about how to fight when their team members are knocked out of the round early.

Learning and developing skills

Constantly learning different skills and developing new ways to strategize forces users to stay in touch with one another in the game, and to keep going back to the game’s various guides. What gamers need in a survival game is to find teammates they get along with and to work out the right strategy together to win the final victory. Because of that need, PUBG launched a number of standout features to help players connect with other gamers, and to help them improve and learn skills through play.

For example, thanks to the chat feature, gamers can improve their communication skills (planning tactics together through chat rooms or voice chat). Besides communication, players also improve their teamwork skills. To survive in this brutal game, players have no choice but to interact with one another to agree on a suitable way to fight. That is why PUBG always encourages players to find teammates before entering a match.

Mastering PUBG requires good skills, and good skills in turn require enough practice.

A realistic experience

Video games, books and films work as a temporary escape from a person’s reality, into another world, another time or someone else’s circumstances. When you try to take someone into another world, the most important factor is a realistic experience. If a game lacks realism, users are left unsatisfied, and the experience does not feel authentic or complete.

One of the reasons so many people prefer PUBG over its rival Fortnite is its more realistic style of graphics and its more realistic gameplay.

To make its settings feel more real and let gamers set foot in actual places, PUBG modeled its terrain on real locations, such as the Mylta Power nuclear plant (based on Chernobyl) and the Ruins temple in Sanhok (based on Mrauk U, Myanmar). A plot, a real-world setting and a backstory for each character are what give players a realistic experience. Gamers can feel as if they have become the character and are living through a real battle.

Free and accessible

When PUBG first launched on Steam, it was a paid game. But every gamer likes playing for free, and only the players who truly loved PUBG were willing to accept that price. Recognizing the demand for free play, PUBG officially let gamers play for free on all platforms from January 12, 2022. Users only spend money when they buy items and skins for their characters.

Alongside the PC version of PUBG, and so that users could keep playing wherever they were, PUBG released PUBG MOBILE, which players welcomed and enjoyed because they could now play the game right on their smartphones.

PUBG’s creative idea

Online chat, voice communication, inviting friends to play, and playing with other players

Loyalty to PUBG, and addiction to it, is growing among users across many age groups, even though the game is rated PG16 (Dagdee & Philip, 2019). Some studies also suggest that a Blue Ocean strategy and related tactics contributed to the game’s popularity across age groups, and as a result the game gained considerable publicity worldwide in a short period of time. In addition, social interaction between PUBG players appears to be one of the key features that makes the game feel more “alive” than many earlier online games.

Most users say they like the voice communication feature because they can talk to their teammates and discuss tactics for each type of terrain together. Instead of sending text messages, players can talk to their teammates to make sure the whole team knows what is going on. PUBG’s developers therefore changed the way players interact by giving them the right tools (online chat, voice communication, inviting friends to play, or playing with other players). Players can connect not only with gamers in the same region or country, but can also form teams and play with gamers from other countries.

Updates

PUBG was developed and marketed by Bluehole, a small South Korean company (Dagdee & Philip, 2019). In 2018, Bluehole set up the parent company KRAFTON, which now holds PUBG. Although it was considered a small company, Bluehole made efficient use of its limited funds by investing only in social media advertising to reach as many consumers as possible. With this strategic investment, PUBG generated about USD 11 million within three days of release and sold 1 million copies within a month. PUBG’s growth caught the attention of online game operators around the world as a lesson in how to compete better. What made PUBG distinctive, however, was that its operators recognized the need to build players’ loyalty to the game through frequent feature updates. As a result, PUBG invested a significant budget in marketing, as well as in the strategic analysis that “Bluehole” carried out on how to reach its target audience.

PUBG is a battle royale shooter, playable in both third-person and first-person view, in which users fight opponents with a range of weapons and strategies to complete their mission. The game begins with 100 players parachuting from a plane into a predetermined scenario on a particular island. Once they land, users and their opponents all start by collecting weapons and using the tools available to work out strategies for eliminating one another. The powerful features built into the game make for highly addictive gameplay.

Besides feature updates, PUBG also sells items and skins that users can buy to transform into different kinds of characters. It is this strategy that keeps PUBG players constantly improving their gaming experience and keeps them curious about which special outfit PUBG will release next.

At the end of July 2022, PUBG MOBILE brought the Koenigsegg supercar back into the game in its second collaboration with the carmaker, which caught gamers’ attention. On the skin side, PUBG also launched a gilded “holy armor” set and updated the Pharaoh to 7 stars. This effects set offers the Bullet frenzy and Headshot frenzy features, which make it easier to land hits. However, owning this skin set is fairly expensive (700 gold and 21 meteorite stones), so it was not popular with gamers, since it had nothing else special to offer.

Chat rooms, YouTube channels and getting help directly from more experienced players

PUBG MOBILE helps players work out strategies and matching tactics together, so users regularly exchange opinions and develop their thinking about the game. Continuously learning different skills and developing new approaches forces users to stay in touch with the game and keep going back to its various learning materials. Some gamers like PUBG MOBILE features such as chat rooms, YouTube channels and getting help directly from more experienced players.

If they get stuck while playing PUBG, gamers can turn to streamers to learn playing skills and combat tactics. In Vietnam, well-known professional PUBG streamers with an impressive style of play include Độ Mixi, Nam Blue and ViruSs, among others.

How it was executed

Key campaigns

PUBG ran several notable campaigns alongside its marketing strategies, including:

• The “Let’s Play” campaign, a collaboration with influential YouTube content creators such as Pewdiepie, Mr. Beast and UnboxTherapy, who produced videos showing how to play the game.

• “Psychological Warfare”: this campaign used cosplayers and female gamers on Instagram to promote the game in the Instagram feed and in Stories.
• “Viral Memes/Epic Moments”: more than 30 pieces of content were created in-house and distributed through a network of social publishers.
• “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner Show”: for this campaign, the publisher produced a 2-hour cooking show featuring Mia Khalifa and the well-known chef Danny Smiles, streamed live on PUBG Mobile’s YouTube and Twitch accounts.

OOH

It is fair to say that out-of-home (OOH) advertising has never gone out of style and has always kept its edge. It keeps its strengths: it is on 24/7, it cannot be skipped, it works well as a reminder and it is seen frequently. Alongside digital channels, the OOH channel still plays a major role in advertisers’ marketing plans.

In Vietnam, PUBG MOBILE did not overlook OOH as a way to introduce the game. The OOH campaign ran in the country’s 2 largest cities, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

In Vietnam, mobile gamers are concentrated in the 16 to 34 age group. So PUBG MOBILE’s target audience was young people as well as office workers. For the OOH campaign, banners were usually placed at roundabouts and major intersections.

In Ho Chi Minh City, banners were placed at the Phù Đổng roundabout, a hot spot in the city center near the New World hotel, and then at the Lý Thái Tổ roundabout, a large roundabout that connects 3 districts. These 2 areas were chosen because of their heavy traffic. Trường Sơn street, which leads to Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport, is a main route that reaches foreign visitors, tourists, young people and office workers. That is why these locations were the right choice for PUBG MOBILE’s OOH ads.

In Hanoi, two of the city’s hot spots were chosen: the Ô Chợ Dừa roundabout and the Hoàng Đạo Thúy and Lê Văn Lương intersection. The roundabout joins 7 different streets and sees heavy, crowded foot and vehicle traffic. The Hoàng Đạo Thúy and Lê Văn Lương intersection is surrounded by apartment buildings and places popular with young people. These 2 locations therefore promised to bring the ads in front of a larger number of viewers.

The PUBG MOBILE x Blackpink campaign also made it into the Top 5 Digital Billboard (LED screen) locations in Vietnam. This shows that PUBG MOBILE picked the right locations and that the campaign was effective.

Influencers

The launch of the PUBG Mobile app in North America drew a great deal of attention in today’s busy mobile games market. With an influencer strategy, sound execution and a distinctive creative approach, the app launch exceeded its original goal (by more than 120%) and reached as many as 78.8 million impressions.

Tencent Games partnered with Viral Nation, an influencer agency, to develop and run an online marketing campaign around the rollout of its app across North America. With the goals of raising brand awareness, driving game installs and growing on social platforms, Viral Nation began planning an influencer marketing and social media campaign for one of the most anticipated mobile app launches of 2018.

The campaign was built on 4 main components: “Let’s Play” videos, cosplay, viral memes and a live-streamed cooking show. It was a multi-platform strategy that used several very successful tactics and beat both the campaign goals and the brand’s own expectations. Viral Nation activated a total of 38 influencers and 20 Instagram theme pages across several verticals to achieve these results.

The campaign started by partnering with some of the most influential YouTube content creators in the world, such as “Pewdiepie”, “Mr. Beast” and “UnBoxTherapy”, who produced “Let’s Play” videos of up to 5 minutes. The gameplay videos were created to showcase PUBG Mobile’s features, maps and various tactical missions on each creator’s YouTube account.

Using YouTube gamers proved to be an effective tactic for building awareness of PUBG MOBILE’s features and demonstrating how distinctive they were. YouTube alone delivered an astonishing 16,700,000 total views and 169,000 total click-to-installs (CTI).

To close the campaign, Viral Nation combined in-game themes with three different areas of influence to raise brand awareness for PUBG Mobile. It brought in 3 lifestyle and gaming influencers, Mia Khalifa, Taylor Alesia and Alinity Divine, to promote PUBG MOBILE. The unusual mix of talent, humor, cooking and gaming drew a large audience, with 100,000 live views for the “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner” livestream.

In Vietnam, PUBG worked with the singer Chi Pu to release the music video “Em nói anh rồi”. Before that, PUBG had only ever reached an audience of gamers. After sponsoring the music video, PUBG reached a younger audience, people who were ready to download the game once they became curious after seeing it appear in the music video.

PUBG through the lens of the flywheel

Attract

As Kang put it: “The important thing is that content creators are always looking for new content, and some of them are especially looking for something unique to set their channel apart. Bigger, more influential streamers will promote your game if it is a mainstream game, if it helps them grow their viewership, or if the game is a hot topic that week.”

Bluehole did not have enough money to pay streamers to play PUBG, but it realized that mid-tier streamers would be interested, because they wanted something to differentiate their channels and create something unique, yet lacked the resources or connections to get access to exclusive content. Kang said this was an opportunity for a mutually beneficial relationship, noting that Bluehole could give mid-tier streamers access to exclusive content. In return, those streamers would try to promote the game as prominently as possible, because they had exclusive access.

After winning over mid-tier streamers, PUBG MOBILE began identifying potential testers and streamers, and started drawing the attention of famous streamers by sending them emails.

Engage

“We made the game a privilege,” Kang said. “We were very nervous about showing the PUBG build and thought people would be unhappy or would not trust us. But it turned into a privilege, because you had to be invited. You had to be a streamer, a long-time fan of Brendan, or you had to have a good PC to be able to test the alpha build, because the application was quite heavy.” The game’s exclusivity worked very well, especially once they set up a private Discord server for testers, where they shared information that was not public and was not given to the press.

This boosted engagement and gave Bluehole a good line of communication to make sure every tester understood that this was the earliest version of the game and still a work in progress. “[Streamers] really want to talk to the developers. They really appreciate it when you reach out to them and give them information. Even if it is just a few Twitter DMs, they want to talk to the developers or the community managers, not PUBG’s PR staff.” This is what helped build personal relationships, especially by responding to requests at every hour of the day. If you keep engaging with them directly even after your game has gained enough traction, they will remember it and help you reach more potential players, or speak positively about the game.

To help players get used to the game quickly, PUBG starts them off with simple challenges. But the challenges get harder and harder, which makes players want to conquer them. For example, at the start of a solo match, you have to find your own weapons and gear before entering the fierce battle. If you do not survive, you are out of the match. So you will always look for ways to survive by fighting in a team and discussing survival strategies together. The amount of time spent playing the game and the experience players build up are key factors for winning each round.

By making the game easy to get into and then raising the difficulty of its challenges, PUBG got players “hooked” and eager to complete each challenge. To meet this need, PUBG rolled out team play, which makes it easy to interact and plan strategies together to finish each round.

Delight

• Online chat, voice communication, inviting friends to play, and playing with other players

Thanks to the chat feature, gamers who do not know each other can work together to come up with a suitable strategy. Unlike other games, PUBG offers a feature for adding friends to your combat squad. Players are completely free to form teams with teammates they already know instead of playing alongside strangers. Because its aim is to help gamers interact and build teamwork skills, PUBG provides features for sending messages to team members or using voice chat when they need to discuss tactics.

• Updates

PUBG’s growth has caught the attention of online game operators. New features, items and weapons added through updates are what keep players coming back. Besides new challenges and new maps to play on, PUBG keeps releasing supercars and skins to improve the gaming experience, partly as a way to help players get through battles more easily.

Even after earning huge profits from its players, PUBG Mobile keeps changing and updating its best content and adding new challenges for its players. To give players the best experience, PUBG has put new items and skins on sale so players can transform into a wide range of characters. For example, if a gamer wants to become a member of the Galaxy squad, or turn into a B.Duck duck, they will certainly not want to miss PUBG’s item sales.

The Royal Pass reward package is also popular with gamers. Royal Pass comes in 2 versions, Free and Elite. Free only gives rewards at a few milestones, while Elite gives rewards for every milestone the player reaches, from premium gun skins to clothes and masks, and every item is “rare and unusual”.

• Chat rooms, YouTube channels and getting help directly from more experienced players

Through its chat rooms, PUBG MOBILE helps players cooperate to work out strategies and tactics. Learning skills and developing new approaches forces users to stay in touch with the game and keep coming back to its various learning materials. In other words, PUBG is not just a game for relaxing; it is also a place that connects gamers who share a passion for games like PUBG.

In Vietnam, PUBG players can also connect with streamers to pick up tips for playing PUBG. Some fairly well-known streamers in the PUBG community include Nam Blue, Viruss and Trâu TV, among others. These streamers have strong combat skills and a friendly way of talking to their audience, so they have attracted large followings on YouTube. Streamers share playing tips and things to watch out for in particular fighting styles or terrain, and this is exactly what PUBG players need to get past challenges more easily.

Instead of solo play, PUBG offers team play so players can take on challenges together. To keep the user experience from getting boring, PUBG also keeps updating and selling items and skins that let gamers transform into a variety of characters. Finally, connecting with PUBG’s streamer community is another way for players to get help from professional gamers and overcome challenges more easily.

Results

Attract

• In March 2021, Tencent announced that PUBG Mobile had passed 1 billion downloads outside China.
• PUBG MOBILE’s revenue reached USD 1.18 billion in 2021, of which USD 253.7 million came in the last 3 months of the year.
• PUBG holds the record for concurrent players on Steam: 3,257,248 players on January 13, 2018.

Engage

• In Vietnam, PUBG Mobile combined a Branded Hashtag Challenge with In-Feed ads on TikTok to grow followers and engagement quickly.
• In the first week after the game went free to play (January 2022), PUBG’s new players rose 486%, and in the CIS, Southeast Asia and South America regions alone they rose 537%.
• By mid-2020, PUBG had sold about 70 million copies on PC, Xbox One and PS4 (cumulative, not counting the mobile version). Most of its players now come from the mobile version.

Delight

• PUBG Mobile gamers welcomed the Royale Pass feature. According to Sensor Tower estimates, PUBG Mobile’s total revenue passed USD 50 million in August 2018, less than two months after Royale Pass launched, and average daily revenue was about 4 times higher than before Royale Pass existed.

PUBG is not just a source of entertainment; it also brings players a number of benefits. Players can build teamwork and communication skills through team play, for instance, or practice planning strategies with their teammates. In other words, PUBG always puts its users at the center, valuing interaction and connection between players. Or, quite simply, it keeps improving the gaming experience by releasing new items and skins.

This article was compiled by Adtek. The influencer campaign section draws on Viral Nation’s Shorty Awards entry (2019). Updated on October 18, 2026.