Seoul: Krafton Inc., a South Korean game publisher renowned for its popular game PUBG: Battlegrounds, announced that its third-quarter net profit more than tripled compared to the previous year, driven by the success of the shooter game. The company reported in a regulatory filing that its net income for the July-September period reached 369.4 billion won (US$256.8 million), marking a 204.3 percent increase from the same period last year.

According to Yonhap News Agency, Krafton's operating profit for the quarter was 348.6 billion won, up from 324.4 billion won a year earlier. Sales grew by 21 percent, totaling 870.6 billion won. These figures surpassed market expectations, as analysts had estimated an average net profit of 303.2 billion won based on a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency.

For the first nine months of the year, Krafton achieved an operating profit of 1.05 trillion won, marking the first time the company surpassed the 1 trillion-won mark in this period. The mobile division sales increased by 14.8 percent year-on-year to 488.5 billion won, while the PC division sales rose by 29 percent to 353.9 billion won. The company credited the robust PC performance to collaborative content on PUBG featuring K-pop stars aespa and G-Dragon, as well as luxury car brand Bugatti.

Krafton has announced plans to further expand its PUBG franchise by upgrading to the Unreal Engine 5 system and increasing user-generated content on the platform. The company is also investing approximately 100 billion won to establish a graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster, aligning with its transition towards becoming an artificial intelligence (AI)-focused gaming company.