Christopher Cruz
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In today’s gaming landscape, players have a nearly bottomless buffet of choices for how to spend their time. Free-to-play and seasonal live-service platforms are everywhere, all competing for people’s attention and prolonged engagement by way of perpetual updates and shiny IP collabs to break through the noise. But for the better part of a decade, one game has weathered the ebbs and flows of the industry and evolved to meet players’ expectations, regularly setting the trend for what has and will be popular.
That game is PUBG MOBILE — a defining title in modern Battle Royale gameplay, wherein 100 combatants airdrop onto an island to compete to be the last one standing, and one of the most popular mobile games on the planet.
Released in 2018, PUBG MOBILE (co-developed by Lightspeed Studios of Tencent Games and KRAFTON, Inc.) has spent the last eight years earning its stripes as a global obsession, available in over 200 markets and downloaded more than a billion times. Its road to success is marked by complex strategic investment that goes beyond being just a stellar multiplayer game — which is still fundamental — to become a full-featured platform that invites fans of all backgrounds to pursue their interests, from casual to professional and beyond.
The key to PUBG MOBILE’s ascension isn’t a single initiative but rather a targeted mission to give players a litany of experiences that speak to them personally in order to build a global community. Most importantly, its creators are looking to younger generations for inspiration on how to keep things fresh.
The new global age of gaming
For Rick Li, Producer of PUBG MOBILE and Deputy General Manager of Quantum Studio at LightSpeed Studios, Tencent Games, the first eight years of the game’s lifespan have been a series of milestones that have allowed his team to evolve organically alongside players’ tastes. That began with a rapid expansion into multiple territories to establish a massive community.
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“The game achieved true globalization, especially after the explosive expansion in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa,” Li tells Rolling Stone via translator. “This allowed us to build an unprecedented global player base and community, but also signifies the adoption of battle royales worldwide, which laid the foundation for the game’s long-term development.”
After achieving a worldwide rollout, Li notes that the next step was to focus on cultural integration around its in-game events and content. “Because our global user base is continuing to diversify, we have been rolling out a lot of themed content,” he says. “For example, Ancient Secret: Arise, our Egyptian-themed gameplay mode — which received very positive feedback because of the cultural and diversity inclusion in the game.”
The Egyptian-themed gameplay Li refers to isn’t just limited to the in-game experience, but was also brought to life through real-world activations, including the PUBG MOBILE Eighth Anniversary Carnival held this March in Giza.
“Through this approach,” Li adds, “we have established a content strategy which centers on global resonance.”
The next generation of PUBG MOBILE players
While the global reach of PUBG MOBILE is impressive, the achievement would be for naught if the game’s audience remained limited to any one age group. Paramount to its longevity and evolution is striking a chord with players who won’t just be engaging today, but driving attention for the foreseeable future. While the average age of gamers stands around 41, it’s Gen Z and Alpha whose interests will shape the health of live-service platforms.
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“Gen Z is always an important part of our community. And for PUBG MOBILE itself, we do not only stand to become a game that players play, but we also want it to become a lifestyle for all our players,” Li says. “And we all know that the lifestyle of everyone changes as people grow and mature, and so their demands and their needs also continue to change.”
Vincent Wang, General Manager and Head of PUBG MOBILE Publishing, Tencent Games, agrees with Li’s assessment. Wang tells Rolling Stone that younger generations of players don’t just have different desires than their elders, but have an entirely different perception of gaming entirely.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha were all born with a touch screen — especially Gen Alpha. PC or TV is not their first entertainment entry point,” Wang says. “They are all tech-savvy, so they know what they are doing. They understand the latest technology. More importantly, they are somehow self-centric in a positive way. Previously, most of the players just consumed content; but Gen Alpha, besides consuming content, they also want to create and be part of the content.”
To meet the desire to create, the developers launched World of Wonder, a free build user-generated content (UGC) mode in 2023, timed to PUBG Mobile’s fifth anniversary. Using the PUBG Mobile creator toolkit, fans can customize their experiences within WoW to fit numerous genres like racing, deathmatch, and, of course, Battle Royale.
“World of Wonder’s core vision is to enable players to not only participate in the game, but also shape the experience, both for themselves and for others,” Li says. “We want to gradually return the power of defining how to play to the players themselves. We noticed an increasing number of players want to innovate and expand beyond the existing gameplay, and the shared abundance of valuable creative ideas continues to increase. It inspired us to launch the World of Wonder as a platform which can bring their ideas to life.”
Since 2023, World of Wonder has been met with feverish enthusiasm by the PUBG MOBILE community, seeing over 5.4 million player-created maps, and catching the attention of not just amateur creators, but professional creative teams and small gaming studios who are, as Li puts it, “enhancing the diversity and polish of the gameplay.”
According to Wang, a major contributing factor to World of Wonder’s popularity is its ease of use compared to other in-game creator platforms — being specifically designed for mobile users like Gen Alpha. “They want to express themselves, so we actually lower the bar in a very easy way,” he says. “As a platform, you can use your mobile phone to edit the content, rather than most of the other games, where you have to use a PC to do the editing. We also integrate AI so that you don’t necessarily need to know how to do the coding, so you can just test, be creative, and then the AI will help you do a lot of the infrastructure work.”
Li adds that a PC-based editing tool is planned to launch later this year.
Building better partnerships
Beyond the self-expression of bespoke creator tools, there’s another key aspect to PUBG MOBILE’s ecosystem that’s painstakingly developed to meet the demands of young players: brand partnerships. Famous brands and IP collaborations aren’t anything new or novel — basically every game (live-service or even singleplayer) regularly incorporates crossovers as a marketing tool these days. Yet the approach taken by PUBG MOBILE seems, in some ways, more elevated than the competition, more curated. It’s a platform where everything from anime and automotives to fast food and luxury fashion all fit in together.
Throughout the years, PUBG MOBILE has collaborated with brands of all kinds. Auto companies like McLaren, Tesla, and Bugatti have had vehicles appear in-game, while multimedia titans like Dragon Ball Super, Godzilla, and Spider-Man have done character and gameplay feature takeovers. Looking ahead, a collaboration with Ferrari is also on the horizon, further expanding the game’s reach across automotive culture. But rather than simply swapping in avatars or skins and calling it a day, there’s actually a deeper layer to how the developers choose the right brands to feature in their ecosystem and, vitally, how the content can be designed to offer more than basic cosmetics.
“With industry partners, we want this to be first, a cultural fit, and secondly, it should look authentic. We can provide this immersive experience to our players,” Wang explains. “A couple of months ago, we collaborated with Balenciaga to create in-game items and looks in partnership with their team. Whatever we do, we want to make it reasonable; we want to make each one feel legitimate. They’re made so that there’s a reason why Balenciaga is inside the game. If there’s a Balenciaga crossover in PUBG MOBILE, there’s also a t-shirt inside their boutique.”
“It redefines the boundaries of the game and fashion,” Li adds. “The most influential partners are those that foster new ways of interacting and creating shared experiences. It’s not just an announcement of how good we are doing the collaboration, but whether the content that we have made truly reflects the core idea of the collaborator that we are integrating into the game.”
For partners like Balenciaga, that integration involves having the collaborator specifically design content for the game. For others, like Dragon Ball Super, the PUBG MOBILE developers spend an extended period distilling the elements they want in-game to match their own tone and sensibilities. “We spent over one year analyzing the characters and the combat that they have delivered in animation,” Li says. “We bring that combat and the different characters[and skills to Battle Royale so that our players can not only experience the game with new skills and characters, they can also experience the characters of Dragon Ball Super, their fights and stories.
In 2022, K-Pop icons Blackpink partook in PUBG MOBILE’s first-ever virtual concert, which surpassed over 15.7 million views — landing the group an MTV Video Music Award for “Best Metaverse Performance.” Reflecting on that milestone, Li says, “To achieve that, we not only hired professional directors as consultants to integrate how to do concerts right, we also spent over two years to analyze how their songs can fit into the game and interact with the visual design of PUBG MOBILE.”
The agency of IRL experiences
Virtual events like the seminal Blackpink concert add another layer of immersion for fans, but the PUBG MOBILE team are also strong advocates of building a bridge between their audience’s digital activity and real-world experiences. Through large-scale events like the recent eighth anniversary carnival in Giza, there’s a dual-pronged approach to engaging their base: esports competition and celebrating the UGC community.
On the esports front, it’s something endemic to the game’s genre. PUBG MOBILE is fiercely competitive for pro players and casuals alike, and to foster that spirit, PUBG MOBILE Esports hosts multiple global esports series per year — most notably the 2026 PUBG MOBILE Global Open (PMGO), which has already surpassed one million registrations, with its Season One Main Event set to take place from June 2 to 7 in Jakarta, Indonesia.
SWEETDDD “PUBG MOBILE has always been a tactical battle game, which is natural for esports to develop, so we have been continuously upgrading our esports ecosystem,” Li says. “We have, one, a lot of prizes, and we not only created a competitive platform for the elite players, but we also see it as a connecting point with players worldwide. In recent years, we have been switching from professional-only esports to esports for everyone. That enables casual players who love the competition to also join the game and the ecosystem.”
Li points toward last year’s PUBG MOBILE Global Championship (PMGC) in Bangkok as a prime example of how they can create a holistic environment for all types of fans. The event extended beyond the arena into a citywide celebration, featuring large-scale fan activations, brand collaborations, live performances, and immersive experiences that brought the game into players’ everyday spaces, which “fits in the daily life of players, where they visit, hangout on weekends.”
Wang notes that the goal of PUBG MOBILE esports isn’t to just cater to the top competitors, but push casual players to test themselves, incentivized by a huge prize pool. “Since the very beginning, we have gone from super professional esports to today, where our slogan is ‘Everyone can be the one,’” he says. “This year, there are more than one million people involved in our global open, so that, no matter if you are a pro or amateur player, you can be part of this game. At the same time, we integrate a lighter lifestyle-like esports experience in our game so that our themed modes and our IP collaborations will all be a part of the esports event. It’s more welcoming, and people can be part of esports.”
Alternatively, Li emphasizes that it’s not just competitive play that enriches the PUBG MOBILE community, and special attention must be paid to the creators who are investing their time and energy into UGC. “The long-term development of this ecosystem is vital, so we have established a multifaceted creator incentive system that includes both growth mechanisms, in-game awards, and a special World of Wonder incentive plan,” he says. “We updated the incentive plan this year with a total prize pool of over ten million U.S. dollars, and this is a sincere welcome to players all over the world to join us to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem.”
For the last three years, PUBG MOBILE has hosted the World of Wonder Creator Annual Ceremony, a gala to honor the creators who have made outstanding contributions to the game. Li is proud to say that the ceremony has gradually become more of an industry event than solely a grassroots community meet-up, and is essential to strengthening the bonds between users.
“We invite the creators to attend the event in person. They can experience the creative atmosphere, communicating with all the creators from all over the world,” Li says. “And we also livestream the event online as recognition, drawing the attention of players worldwide. We want the highlights of the creators to be seen.”
For Wang, the post-pandemic era is predicated on these in-person celebrations. After pivoting to a virtual world for so long, players worldwide are looking for a more intimate, tangible experience. “I think that’s actually something that we must do because during the pandemic years, all these offline events and physical events were impossible,” he says. “We noticed that, in the post-pandemic period, people are going out, they are going offline. To that end, we must serve the community. We must serve this to our player base.”
For Gen Alpha, specifically, Wang says, “They make friends in online spaces, but they also connect with them in offline settings. If the users have this kind of social request, we will provide these scenes for them to experience.”
