New partner teams and more LAN tournaments — PUBG esports in 2023

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KRAFTON has named eight esports teams that have been granted partner status at official PUBG tournaments in 2023. The list includes PUBG Global Championship 2022 finalists and six other teams. Selected participants will receive invites to PUBG Global Series tournaments to be held in April and September. They will also get a share from in-game items sales.

List of PUBG Global Series Partner Teams in 2023:

• Four Angry Men;

• 17Gaming;

• Patrichor Road;

• Gen.G;

• Natus Vincere;

• Twisted Mind;

• FaZe Clan;

• Soniqs. 

KRAFTON has previously used a similar scheme with partner teams for PUBG Continental Series regional leagues. Last year the list of organizations included Virtus.pro, Team Liquid, Heroic, BBL Esports, and other teams.

PUBG Esports Season in 2023

At the end of last year, KRAFTON published a roadmap with a redesigned PUBG Global Series format for 2023, the tournament series will resume offline after a two-year hiatus caused by the coronavirus pandemic. 

Instead of the two regional series in 2023, there will be three stages: in March, July and October. Participants will compete for ranking points to advance to PUBG Global Championship.

Two PUBG Global Series tournaments will be held in April and September, where partner teams, as well as winners of regional qualifiers, will play. PGS will not only become the main tournament series of the season, but will also return to the LAN format. In June, the developers will hold the next PUBG Nations Cup, which has proven itself well in 2022.

Finally, in November, PUBG Global Championship, the final tournament of the season in 2023, will take place, where the best teams in the world will compete for a prize pool of several million dollars (in 2022, the sum was $3.3 million).

Where is the Main Audience of PUBG Esports?

At the very beginning, PUBG esports scene was rather fragmented, with a large number of 3rd party tournaments in different countries. During the coronavirus pandemic, the organizers could not hold events in the previous format and introduced a more structured system with PUBG Continental Series online leagues.

The PUBG Continental Series leagues spanned four regions: Asia, Europe, Americas, and APAC (Asia Pacific). Despite the fact that the tournaments were held all over the world, the number of viewers in each region was different. For example, the most popular were leagues in the APAC region, where teams from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia and other countries played. There, Peak Viewers numbers at broadcasts often exceeded 100K people.

In Europe and America, the popularity of the game was significantly lower, and the number of Peak Viewers was barely a third of those in APAC.

PUBG Continental Series 7 Regional League Statistics

As for PUBG Global Championship, the latest tournament showed almost the same numbers as in 2021 — the Average Viewers number at the last world championship was 104.1K people, and the Peak Viewers number reached 187.5K viewers.

On the one hand, such stability is rather a plus for not the youngest discipline in a very competitive genre. On the other hand, the game is unlikely to be able to attract new viewers without some major changes or innovations.

PUBG Global Championship comparison

The peak of PUBG's popularity was in 2018, when almost 760K PV watched the matches of the PUBG Global Invitational 2018. Now this figure is 2-3 times lower. There are several reasons for a gradual decline in the audience. Firstly, PUBG has a very difficult genre to compete in, where many top games have been released over the past few years (Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and others). Secondly, PUBG is mainly popular only in Asia, but in Europe and America it is of little interest to anyone, and so far there are no objective reasons for this situation to change.

PUBG is a very popular brand not only in esports but also in gaming in general. However, players have paid much more attention to the mobile version of the title in recent years, rather than the classic one. The situation is the same with the audience — PUBG Mobile championships are watched by five, and sometimes ten times more people than the original PUBG tournaments.