PUBG Esports names 12 Global Partner Teams for the 2026 season

Twelve teams now know they will play every event of the PUBG Global Series in 2026, whatever their results. PUBG Esports, the competitive arm of the game's publisher Krafton, published the list of its Global Partner Teams for the season on February 11, 2026. Two days later, on February 13, it named the twelve other teams invited to complete the field for the first half of the year.

The Global Partner program is the closest thing PUBG: Battlegrounds has to permanent places. The game is a battle royale, a genre in which many squads land on the same map and the last one alive wins the match, and its international circuit is run by Krafton. A partner team is guaranteed entry to the whole PUBG Global Series, known as PGS, receives its own in-game items with a share of what they earn, and gets yearly funding from the publisher.

The 2026 list is longer than the one before it. Krafton selected ten partner teams for 2025, in an announcement dated February 21, 2025. It has chosen twelve this time, and said in its announcement that many teams applied and that picking only twelve was not an easy decision.

PUBG Esports announcements of February 9 and February 11, 2026, and of February 21, 2025 for the earlier list.

The twelve teams Krafton chose

The announcement of February 11 lists the teams in alphabetical order and gives no regions: 17 Gaming, 4AM, Anyone's Legend, DN SOOPers, eArena, FULL SENSE, Gen.G Esports, Natus Vincere, Petrichor Road, Team Falcons, Twisted Minds and Virtus.pro. The follow-up post of February 13 sorts them by region, which shows how the twelve places are spread.

China and the region Krafton calls EMEA, for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, hold three partner places each. South Korea and Thailand have two each. The Americas and Vietnam have one each. In that second post the Chinese team 4AM appears under its full name, Four Angry Men.

Krafton did not publish its reasons team by team, and the 2026 announcement lists no selection criteria. It thanks every team that applied. A year earlier the publisher had said that a committee assessed the applications against criteria announced beforehand.

Who stayed, who joined and who is missing

Set side by side, the two lists show what changed in a year. Eight names appear in both: 17 Gaming, Four Angry Men, eArena, Gen.G, Natus Vincere, Petrichor Road, Team Falcons and Twisted Minds. A ninth 2025 entry was listed as DN Freecs; the 2026 list carries DN SOOPers.

Three names of 2026 were not on the 2025 list at all: Anyone's Legend, FULL SENSE and Virtus.pro. One name of 2025 is absent from the new one: The Expendables, which Krafton presented a year ago as the reigning world champion and the first Vietnamese team to win the world title. The team has not left the circuit. It is among the twelve invited teams named on February 13, as one of the two representatives of the PUBG Vietnam Series.

The 2025 announcement also recorded why some of the teams that stayed were picked in the first place. Krafton described Twisted Minds as the only team to have won the PUBG Global Series three times in a row, 17 Gaming as the first Chinese team to win a PGS title, and Natus Vincere as the 2022 world champion. Gen.G was presented as the winner of the first major international PUBG tournament, Four Angry Men as a veteran side with four titles in China's PUBG Champions League, and Petrichor Road as a team with three titles in the PCS Asia series. Team Falcons, the only partner from the Americas, had won an event of the PUBG Americas Series and taken on all the former Soniqs players.

What a partner place brings

The announcement names three benefits. The first is guaranteed entry to every PGS series of the year: four Global Circuits, each made of three series, so twelve series in all. The second is the release of exclusive Team Edition skins, the cosmetic items sold in the game in a team's colors, with the revenue shared between the publisher and the team. Krafton does not give the percentage. The third is annual support funding.

On that last point the season roadmap published on February 9 gives a figure: a line reading partner team annual support, US$1,000,000. The roadmap does not say whether the amount is paid to each team or shared among the twelve. Esports Insider, reporting on the roadmap the same day, wrote that partnered teams would receive over US$1 million in annual support.

Krafton presents the money as a way to let organizations plan. According to the announcement, the funding helps teams prepare for the season with stability and concentrate on managing their rosters over the long term, while fans follow the same familiar teams from one event to the next. The roadmap adds a sentence about duration: "These support structures aren't one-time policies limited to 2026."

How a PGS event is filled and played

A partner place matters because of how the series is built. Each PGS has 24 teams: the twelve Global Partner Teams and twelve teams that come through the Regional Series, the competitions of each region. For the first half of 2026 those twelve were chosen by invitation, two from each of six regional competitions: the PUBG Americas Series, China's PUBG Champions League, the PUBG EMEA Championship, the PUBG Thailand Series, the PUBG Vietnam Series and Korea's PUBG Weekly Series.

These 24 teams play the two circuits of the first half, which fall in March and May according to Esports Insider's account of the roadmap. The two circuits of the second half follow in August and October, and for those the roadmap says that the selection of regional teams will weigh heavily on results in the first half's Regional Series.

A circuit lasts three consecutive weeks, one series a week. In Series 1 every team starts from zero. In Series 2 the teams are seeded, meaning placed in the draw, according to what they did the week before. The third week is the Series Final, and the team that finishes on top is the Circuit Champion.

The prize money follows that shape. The roadmap gives US$100,000 for Series 1, US$100,000 for Series 2 and US$300,000 for the Series Final, which makes US$500,000 for a circuit. Four circuits make the US$2,000,000 that Krafton announces as the total PGS prize pool for the twelve series of 2026.

The road left open to everyone else

Krafton was careful to say that the twelve partner places do not close the circuit. Teams with strong Regional Series performances will have opportunities to join PGS, the announcement says, and it adds that the path to the world championship remains open to all teams through PGS and Regional Series results. It closes on the idea that players watching from the sidelines today could be on that stage tomorrow.

The roadmap of February 9 describes that path in five steps, from open play to the season's last event.

The PUBG Global Championship, or PGC, is the event that ends the year and decides the world title. Its 32 places come from two sources: the top eight teams of the PGS Points standings, and the top 24 of the yearly Regional Series, shared out by region. A structure of stages and seeding then sends 16 teams to the Grand Final. A partner team therefore has two ways in, through the points it collects in twelve guaranteed series or through its region, while a team outside the program depends on its Regional Series and on the PGS places those results can earn. Krafton had not yet published the regional points system when the roadmap came out.

What comes next in the 2026 calendar

The roadmap describes a season of more than nine months of nearly continuous competition, from March to December. The first circuit of the PUBG Global Series opens it in March, followed by Regional Series 1 in April and the second circuit in May.

June belongs to the PUBG Nations Cup, where players represent their country and not their organization. The Esports World Cup, the multi-game event held in Riyadh, follows in July. The third circuit comes in August, Regional Series 2 in September, the fourth circuit in October and the championship in December.

Around the matches, Krafton also announced changes inside the game for the season: a revamped Pick'em Challenge, in which players earn in-game rewards for correct predictions, a new in-game fantasy league and a new Esports Pass. The publisher also says it wants the game's Ranked Mode to match competitive settings more closely, and patches to be better synchronized with the esports calendar. Detailed schedules for the Regional Series, and more details on the first circuit, are still to be published.

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