Krafton on the 24th unveiled its 2026 development roadmap, aiming for its flagship title PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS to continue double-digit growth this year. This year's roadmap focuses on sustained updates to enhance user fun and immersion, and on strengthening competitiveness by adding diverse content.
Marking its 9th anniversary this year, Battlegrounds is Krafton's flagship intellectual property (IP), with peak concurrent users surpassing 1.3 million this month. Krafton said it will enhance gameplay experience and advance its live service based on diverse content to extend the lifespan of the Battlegrounds IP.
First, to create a tactical play environment, Krafton will introduce a terrain destruction system that lets players directly alter the landscape, and will enable strategic movement and item acquisition through the addition of a "secret room" area on the Miramar map and map updates.
It will also create a more immersive environment with physics-based interactive smoke that billows in the wind and disperses with explosions, by adding an item-calling function to Blue Chip Towers, and by improving the equipment system. Alongside this, it will focus on offering a variety of gameplay experiences by newly introducing a casual competitive format.
In addition, through meta rotation that changes the set of powerful weapons each season and major updates on a four-month cycle, it will adjust item balance and continuously improve content. Ranked mode will overhaul its reward system so in-game performance can be translated more intuitively.
In Apr., as part of a strategy to expand Battlegrounds into a gameplay platform that offers a variety of shooting experiences, it will introduce Xenopoint, a well-made mode in the looter shooter roguelite genre that combines three elements—co-op, growth, and攻略. It also plans to unveil Payday, a heist mode developed in collaboration with Swedish game studio Starbreeze.
It will expand user-generated content (UGC) and increase collaborations with IP in gaming and animation.
PUBG Fantasy League, a participatory format where users form teams and run tournaments themselves, will make its debut at the PUBG Nations Cup 2026, an international Battlegrounds esports competition.
Krafton will accelerate server expansion to build a stable service environment. Based on this, it plans to maximize quality on consoles. It will also further strengthen its anti-cheat solution to ensure a fair user environment. Specifically, it will improve detection accuracy, refine the process for reviewing erroneous penalties, and fine-tune management strategies by region and platform.
A company official said, "In particular, for cheating attempts based on direct memory access, we have enhanced detection functions through dedicated research and development, and we will continue to treat this as a top priority."