PUBG Asia Stars 2026: Vietnamese Player Disqualification Exposes KRAFTON Trust Crisis

On September 17, 2026, at PUBG Asia Stars 2026, KRAFTON — the publisher of PUBG — disqualified two Vietnamese players from the tournament and revoked their PUBG Vietnam Partner status. The action came after the Korean streamer community accused the two players of using information from livestream broadcasts to gain an advantage during competition. Major Vietnamese streamers including Độ Mixi and PewPew immediately deleted PUBG. Internet café owners also removed the game from their systems. The boycott spread not just because of the disqualification, but because KRAFTON's handling of the issue marked a turning point in the relationship between the publisher and the Vietnamese gaming community. PUBG Asia Stars 2026 gathered 48 players and streamers from across Asia. Himass (Lã Phương Tiến Đạt) and TanVuu (Trần Tấn Vũ) — both PUBG Vietnam Partners — were accused of stream sniping. Notably, neither claimed full innocence. They admitted opening the livestream chat and receiving external information, but denied actively watching opponent screens. This partial admission made the case more complex than a completely fabricated accusation. However, this was not the core of the crisis. The real center of gravity lay in the tournament rules. According to publicly available information, KRAFTON had no explicit clause in its competition rules prohibiting stream sniping. The rule did not exist, yet the punishment did — KRAFTON disqualified the players and revoked Partner status based on a regulation that was never established. This was the critical legal gap in tournament administration. When the publisher is simultaneously the rulemaker and the enforcer, punishing players without publicly available rules creates a power vacuum that KRAFTON itself stepped into. Vietnam's response demonstrated the strength of an ecosystem that extends beyond players. Độ Mixi and PewPew — among the most followed gaming content creators in Vietnam — removed PUBG from their content schedules. Internet café owners joining the boycott further reinforced the picture: this was not merely a movement among content creators, but a systemic reaction from the entire gaming value chain in Vietnam. This showed KRAFTON faced risks not only in content but in actual gaming infrastructure. Internet cafés remain a primary access channel for many Vietnamese players, and when café owners decided to remove PUBG, they were betting that the player base would shrink regardless of KRAFTON's actions. From a business perspective, the KOL uninstall movement carried significant financial risk for KRAFTON in the Vietnamese market. In influencer-dependent esports markets, marketing value lies not just in player numbers but in content creation reach. When influential names like Độ Mixi and PewPew stopped producing PUBG content, brand exposure frequency across social platforms dropped significantly. This was damage that direct revenue figures could not adequately reflect. For KRAFTON, revoking PUBG Vietnam Partner status affected not just two individuals but weakened the bridge between the publisher and the local community — those representing the creative content layer and gaming ecosystem operators in Vietnam. The Himass and TanVuu case was the trigger, but the real story was about how a publisher builds and breaks trust in a peripheral market. Vietnam's response demonstrated a reality that many publishers often overlook: gaming communities in markets with large player bases but not top-tier competitive standing still possess enough leverage to pressure publishers back — not through tournament results but through ecosystem power. This was a lesson in decentralized power in the esports industry that any tournament operator needs to remember. The most important question was not whether Himass and TanVuu were wrong, but whether KRAFTON would reform or continue administering through publisher authority. If the first path is chosen, this could become the impetus for KRAFTON to build more transparent rules for the PUBG Asia ecosystem. If the second path is taken, the Vietnamese market risks becoming a gray zone in KRAFTON's strategic map — where players remain but trust does not.