Bluehole held the G-Star Bluehole Media Showcase 2017 on November 9th, KST.

The announcements were made by Hyoseob Kim, the Bluehole CEO, as well as Wooyeol Lim, the Head of Korea Overall Business Department, Yongwook Choi, the Head of Asia Overall Business Department for PUBG Incorporated, and Yeonggwang Wui, the General Manager of Banana Culture Entertainment at the event.The following is the Q&A that took place regarding PUBG in reference to eSports after the announcements.

Could you tell us your plans for your business in China regarding PUBG?

We are preparing for it through our branch office in China at the moment. We cannot give you the details but can tell you that we are trying our best to provide quality service. We will give details later.

The issue regarding aimbot cheats was brought up among the players at the Invitationals. Could you tell us what technical solutions you are preparing to fix this problem?

The aimbot cheats and hacks have been our top priority with our official updates. Even though we are trying to prevent problems regarding hacks, they continue to happen regardless. We will continuously try our best to come up with any means of prevention, but since going into detail can also result in players abusing that info, we can only ask you to understand that we are trying all we can at the moment.

Will you be able to develop a broadcast system which allows viewers to choose what screen they’d like to see from the broadcast?

Actually, there were several issues regarding the players’ individual screens transferred for the broadcast, but I think that is what PUBG should aim for in the first place. We cannot show every player’s plays on just one screen, and viewers want to see their favorite players. It is technically difficult, but I think we should continue to develop it.

It feels like the blue zone has recently gotten deadlier than before. Some players point out that this causes players to fight instead of surviving; what are your thoughts on this?

We think that PUBG emphasizes survival, which is different from any other FPS, and is the essence of the game. We’ve been steadily making improvements to the balance. There’s not much change to how the players can survive through different ways beyond just having good aim or strategies.

We’d like you to note that we found that the modifications were made while we were trying to find the right balance between survival and combat.

What did you find the hardest regarding the game broadcast?

Observing basically includes 8 people. The numbers aren’t important here, the specific screens are important. [But with so many players] there might be some moments of the game that didn’t get to be seen. We think that it isn’t easy even if we have as many observers as we can get since many fights tend to take place after the 3rd blue zone.

What we referred to was how golf games were broadcasted; we think there are good enough ways to deliver the broadcasts to viewers by showing what they missed through replays. Viewers don’t want to see all 80 players. Instead, they prefer to watch their favorite players or players that are fun to watch. And not only that, we have to consider how to best deliver the overall flow of the match as well.

Won’t there be problems with players swearing if you broadcast their voices live?

We basically thought that we should broadcast the teamvoice. Our viewers are curious about what players say to each other, although we agree that problems like swearing have to be prepared for in advance.

80 players have to gather whenever a tournament is held; we’d like to know what you plan to do about it in the future since it isn’t easy to bring all players together in one place.

It is not easy to hold the perfect environment for offline tournaments. As far as I understand, the eSports for PUBG hasn’t completely taken a form that allows us to say “this is the answer”. Not only that, I don’t think all tournaments have to be held offline. In fact, we are also curious as to how PUBG will develop and in what form of eSport. We are sure that we will eventually come up with a solution through numerous attempts and efforts made by eSports broadcasts and those who are related.

It would be nice if you could see PUBG eSports as an attempt to entertain the viewers. We plan to have a test league for a certain period of time after G-Star ends. We are currently in the middle of discussing it with various broadcasts, and you will be able to see the league after G-Star.

We are trying from various aspects for the tournament size, both in Korea and overseas. We promise that we will try to find which part is appropriate as an eSport and whether it is fun enough to be worth watching. We held a tournament for 20 players at TwitchCon 2017, and we had worthwhile results. We plan to try more things in Korea in the future. We hope that you will keep your eyes open for it.