Solana Partners with PUBG Studio Krafton

Krafton, the South Korean video game studio that makes PUBG (>1B downloads), announced an NFT gaming partnership with Solana Labs. Krafton describes the partnership as "a long-term cooperative relationship for the development and operation of blockchain- and NFT-based games and services." Krafton has not said which games will feature Solana integrations.

Gamers have not reacted positively to other recent NFT game integrations, such as centralized exchange FTX's recent purchase of F2P card game Storybook Brawl. Following FTX's purchase announcement, Storybook Brawl fans complained on Twitter and nuked the game's ratings on Steam.

The Verge's Jon Porter believes Krafton's new partnership is part of a larger pattern. As China cracked down on its domestic video game industry, Chinese competitors flooded Krafton's native South Korea. Krafton's stock has fallen since its Chinese competitors arrived. Porter sees Korean gaming firms turning to P2E and blockchain gaming to recover revenue and increase their share prices.

Solana is an Ethereum competitor offering extremely fast, cheap transactions with sub-second finality. Critics bemoan Solana’s centralization. Krafton says it favored the Solana blockchain because “Solana is the world’s most performant blockchain. It gives [...] predictable scaling without compromising security or composability.” Perhaps in business deals like this, centralization could be favorable.

In the 48 hours following the announcement, Solana's SOL token rose from $91 to $104.