PUBG publisher Krafton had an incredibly successful year in 2023, raking in revenue at an all-time high, improving monetisation from in and out-game content, and overall bolstering net profits for the year to ₩594 billion ($446 million).
Growth on PC and console has doubled since 2020 as well, though mobile continues to lead in revenues by a wide margin.
Mobile domination
In fact, of Krafton’s record-breaking ₩1.9 trillion ($1.4 billion) in revenue last year, ₩1.25 trillion ($939 million), or 66%, came from mobile alone. Earnings on PC were the second most impactful, bringing in ₩584 billion ($439 million), while console brought in ₩55.7 billion ($41.9 million).
Notably, while mobile still clearly made up the bulk of Krafton’s 2023 revenue, the earnings brought in via the platform actually decreased by 0.6%. Console gaming revenue was down by a much more dramatic 46.5% however, meanwhile PC saw a rise of 25.6%.
Even so, this may not be entirely indicative of a new trend nor a continued decline in mobile revenues for Krafton, as Q4 actually saw a positive turnaround for mobile with a 34.5% year-on-year revenue increase. Meanwhile, PC only grew by 20.1% in Q4. Revenue from Krafton’s console audience continued to decline at the end of the year, down by a massive 74.3%.
As for the fourth quarter’s operating profit, this grew 30.3% year-on-year to ₩164 billion ($123 million) but fell 13.2% quarter-on-quarter, attributed to increasing costs relating to "major games services". For the full financial year, Krafton made ₩768 billion ($577 million) in operating profit, up from ₩752 billion ($565 million) in 2022.
Net profits, meanwhile, were ₩594 billion ($446 million) in 2023 compared to ₩500 billion ($376 million) in 2022. And adjusted EBITDA was up in 2023 too, at ₩903.7 billion ($679 million) versus ₩792.7 billion ($596 million) the year prior.
Krafton credited its 2023 success to its strengthened F2P transition momentum, seeing "solid growth in traffic and revenue". The company also spent the year investigating AI, having released the most research papers on the subject of any Korean games company in 2023, and the third-most worldwide.
In 2024, Krafton is looking to scale up original creatives as "1B IPs" while centralising its organisations to headquarters. There are multiple new titles on the way too, including SubNautica 2, Dinkum Mobile, and battle royale RPG Darker and Darker Mobile.
Fellow gaming giant Roblox also navigated a lucrative 2023, with revenues of $2.8 billion marking a 26% rise.
