From NewJeans to Himass: The Ledger of Broken Trust in KRAFTON's Four Years

On September 23, 2026, KRAFTON published its investigation report. The shortest sentence in it carried the heaviest weight: Himass and TanVuu had their accounts permanently locked and were barred from every official PUBG esports event organised or approved by KRAFTON, including PGC, PGS and PNC. What came before that was not a tournament result but an administrative diary — a Korean streamer named Soopi's accusation, mid-event point adjustments, increased stream delay, a cancelled third match day, a split prize pool. Then came more than 4.1 million signatures from the Vietnamese community. Do Mixi, PewPew, Rambo, DjChip and Ngan Sat Thu stepped back from PUBG one by one. The whole argument collapsed into one question: was the decision made on the server, or in the announcement queue?

I started with a blank page and one person — in 2026, on Bangladesh's PUBG Mobile casting panel, building team-interview content as TimeBurner. The lesson from that year still holds: a community does not get angry at numbers. It gets angry when the number was never disclosed to it in the first place.

That is the heart of KRAFTON's problem. One company occupies four seats at once. It builds the game. It runs the in-game store. It publishes the drop rates. And it writes the esports rulebook and judges the cases arising from it. When four roles are folded into one hand, any dispute ends in the institution's own vocabulary, and the trust question stays suspended in the community's throat.

The timeline is short. In May 2026, PUBG Mobile shut down in China after licensing trouble, and Tencent moved players to Peacekeeper Elite — a game that looks similar but was changed in gameplay, visuals and content. KRAFTON said the two were separate products. In 2026, ahead of its IPO, ZDNet Korea reported that in regulatory filings KRAFTON had for the first time disclosed it supplies technical services to Peacekeeper Elite and earns a service fee for it. In 2026 came the NewJeans collaboration. In June 2026, Yonhap reported that South Korea's Fair Trade Commission had fined KRAFTON 2.5 million won for providing misleading information about item drop rates in PUBG: Battlegrounds.

The quietest year taught me that absence has a box score. In KRAFTON's ledger, those cells sat empty for years, and the empty cells became the biggest story later.

Take the drop-rate case, because the arithmetic there is clean. In 2026 KRAFTON released two paid products: the PUBG X NewJeans Loot Pack and the PUBG X NewJeans Premium Bundle, which let players open collectible items and character customisation inspired by NewJeans. The announcement promised clearly: after four consecutive failed attempts, the fifth open would guarantee the set blueprint at a 100 per cent rate. In reality, many players who bought more than five Premium Bundles never received the item. Under community pressure, the PUBG team confirmed the Premium Bundle was in fact outside the pity mechanism, and that some in-game displayed information was inaccurate.

The FTC's investigation produced the real figure — the promised 100 per cent was actually 9 per cent — and a fine of 2.5 million won. KRAFTON refunded roughly 1.1 billion won to about 380,000 buyers and added around 9.8 billion won in in-game compensation. Because the company corrected the information on its own and paid compensation, the sanction stayed limited to a monetary fine.

Inside those numbers is a detail that rarely reaches the discussion. Divide 1.1 billion won among the buyers and each gets roughly 2,900 won — in many cases less than the price of a single Premium Bundle. And the bulk of the 9.8 billion won is pure virtual currency, whose marginal production cost to the publisher is close to zero. The headline compensation is large on paper and small on the balance sheet. The question that follows is not moral but architectural: when a publisher sets the odds, announces the odds and defines the verification standard, the phrase 'guaranteed on the fifth attempt' stops being a promise and becomes a marketing line. Bridging 9 per cent and 100 per cent requires a third party, and no such party exists institutionally in gaming today.

The second NewJeans episode is more uncomfortable because the question shifts. In 2026 Korean media reported that some players were using NewJeans members' face skins to create and share sexualised images and videos, pairing the faces with revealing outfits. It drew more attention because Haerin and Hyein were not yet adults at the time. KRAFTON and the management agency ADOR said they would act against uses that did not match the collaboration's original purpose, then restricted combining the NewJeans face skins with certain outfits.

The counter-argument that took hold across Asian communities, Vietnam included, is hard to dismiss: the problem was not confined to user behaviour, because PUBG's customisation architecture made that combination possible in the first place. When a game is modular — separate assets recombined into a character — the user assigns meaning, not the designer. The restriction arrived for an incident, not for a class of design. This is where my usual framing flips: acting against a wrong and admitting the infrastructure that made the wrong possible are two different jobs.

China is another page in the same ledger. The 2026 IPO filing revealed KRAFTON's technical hand and revenue behind Peacekeeper Elite. The disclosure added no new fact; it reopened an old argument. When the players, gameplay, maps and content of a shut-down PUBG Mobile and its replacement overlap so heavily, how much of 'two separate products' is licensing strategy and how much is design truth? KRAFTON has never answered that in the language of the pitch. Across drop rates, skin usage and geopolitics, the pattern repeats: the institution corrects course mid-way, and the period before the correction is never tallied anywhere.

Then comes the event where the story stops being a game and becomes administration. At PUBG Asia Stars 2026, Gen.G's Korean streamer Soopi alleged that opponents were watching livestreams. KRAFTON's September 23 finding stated that Himass and TanVuu used outside information — including other players' livestreams — to make in-match calls and build strategy, classifying it as stream sniping and a violation of both the PUBG operating policy and the professional conduct rules. Before that, organisers had removed the two from the rest of the event, adjusted points, increased livestream delay, cancelled the third match day and split the prize money. After the investigation, KRAFTON said no additional violations were found elsewhere.

Here is my second statistical objection. If livestream delay is a setting, and the setting was raised only after the incident, then before the incident it was configured in a way that let real-time information leak. The vulnerability sat in a broadcast-architecture decision before it ever sat in a player's morality. And both the controller of that architecture and its later judge are the same entity. In football my long-standing complaint about VAR is that the problem is not the verdict but that its reasoning never reaches the stadium audience. Here the stadium is 4.1 million signatures, and nobody has a seat in the room.

This piece is written for two readers at once. One is the Vietnamese community, which needs its own reality named accurately — and naming it accurately means demanding procedural transparency, not lending blind support. The other is the international reader, for whom Southeast Asian esports usually arrives as a single incident or a charity case. That framing is wrong: what happened here is a mature, organised, numerate community reacting faster than any governing body.

So what about the contrarian reading? The easy version runs: the company permanently banned two young players while its own 9 per cent lie cost 2.5 million won. Tempting, but incomplete, because the opposite reading — that any punishment is inherently unjust — is just as lazy. Both skip the actual variable: nowhere in the chain is there an independent party. The scale of the sanction, the evidentiary standard, the choice of example all sit with the same hand that owns the game, the store, the drop rates and the tournament. That the argument in Vietnam reached 4.1 million signatures rather than 1.4 million should itself be read as an audit — the community is improvising the third party nobody else would provide. The least discussed truth is that the biggest beneficiary of this affair is neither KRAFTON nor the two players, but the attention market, where a showmatch dispute becomes a continental conversation within days.

Three things to watch. Whether KRAFTON makes its drop rates and investigative standards publicly auditable — not merely corrected, but audited. Whether the template of 'self-correct and stay within a fine' gets copied by other publishers. And whether 4.1 million signatures remain a Vietnamese one-off or become a repeatable tool for players across South and Southeast Asia. The largest question sits underneath all three: when one company is shopkeeper, regulator and judge, whose shoulders carry the duty of restoring trust the next time?