What Business Models Power Popular Games? Lessons from PUBG for Product Designers

From “PUBG” to Internet Business Models

“PUBG” is a commercial game priced at 98 CNY per copy, selling over 20 million copies and ranking first for 38 weeks, with nearly 3 million concurrent online users.

Revenue comes from game accounts, virtual items, account rentals, coaching, cheats, accelerators, live streaming (tips, ads), and internet cafés.

What Is a Business Model?

A business model is not just a profit model; it includes four perspectives—who to serve, what to offer, how to deliver, and how to earn—and nine components: customer segments, value proposition, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and cost structure.

Common Internet Business Models

Ecology model: Scale up business to achieve a large user base, enabling cross‑industry links, with closed loops, cross‑border collaboration, and incubation capabilities.

Free model: Attract many users with a free offering, build reputation, then monetize via value‑added services; suitable for simple, widely‑appealing products.

Advertising and Marketing

Advertising formats include banner, video, audio, and feed ads. Traditional model matched advertisers with many media outlets; ad exchanges aggregated supply, allowing market‑driven pricing. DSP and SSP platforms now enable real‑time, automated, targeted bidding within a second.

How We Make Money

58.com’s revenue mainly comes from membership services and online promotion.

Membership services: Packages such as “Net Neighbor” and resource bundles; types include recruitment, real estate, automotive, lifestyle, flea market, second‑hand, pets, franchising.

Online promotion: Acts as advertising; 58’s promotion system sells on its main site, weather app, and media. Different products have tailored promotion types: basic platform products, line‑specific customized products, and non‑listing products.

Design for Millions of B‑End Users

B‑end users include ordinary users, merchants across eight business lines, members, as well as product, operations, sales, customer service, and media partners.

Design Strategy

Design challenges include complexity (multiple scenarios and roles), efficiency priority (functionality first), distance from users, difficulty of experience optimization, and limited data for iteration.

Our strategy is to dive into the business, clarify relationships, simplify complexity, organize, hide or shift details, and adopt incremental design—address core needs first, then continuously improve.

Design Practice

Designers are integrating and rebuilding the B‑end system, consolidating business and functions to avoid user confusion, optimizing product logic, iterating designs, and adding new features.