Some Kpopalypse readers are avid gamers and have noted that k-pop girl group IVE are doing a collaboration with PUBG! So what’s that about, and is it even any good and possible to get IVE-related stuff, or is it just a straight up bullshit scam that takes your money and gives you nothing? Kpopalypse investigated this and has the trufax!
PUBG often runs k-pop collaboration events. The “recipe” for these events has standardised over time, so while this post looks specifically at the IVE event, it will also likely be broadly applicable to future k-pop themed events in PUBG, and future events in PUBG in general. So enjoy the trufax.
IVE are a k-pop group.
These are their best two songs, both of which hit the #1 best song in Kpopalypse favourites lists in their respective years of release. You could be listening to them instead of playing some bullshit video game right now if you wanted.
This is a k-pop website therefore some readers may not know or give a shit about computer games, so here’s a quick run-down of what PUBG is.
PUBG (Playerunknown’s Batttlegrounds) is a shooting game played from a first-or-third person perspective, and the first “Battle Royale” format of computer game to ever appear. The game concept is loosely based on the classic Japanese “Battle Royale” movie where a bunch of people are left in a large area, given weapons, and fight until there is only one person standing.
In PUBG everyone parachutes down from a plane onto a huge map, and either alone or in teams of up to four people you find weapons and equipment, and try to be the last person or team alive. To force players to find each other easier, the game gradually shrinks the amount of playing area you’re allowed to be in, so the pace of the game gradually increases as less players are left standing. If you’re thinking “couldn’t I just hide and sneak around until there’s only me and one other person left and then kill the last person?” then yes you absolutely can and that’s in fact the way I prefer to play the game solo because I’m a lot better at hiding than shooting. Playing quiet and sneaky gives PUBG a very different feel from all other shooters, including all the ones that copied PUBG’s format. The game is mostly silent and fantastically eerie when you play stealthily, wandering around deserted towns and countrysides while the fighting is mostly something happening in the distant background until the playing area eventually forces you to get closer. But if you’re more confident with your shooting skills you can try the more action-based route and parachute into busy areas and actively hunt all the players you can. The following video is quite negative about PUBG but also goes a long way towards explaining the appeal of the gameplay in general, as well as why a lot of casual gamers (in the west) eventually abandoned it for Fortnite and other games.
While I agree with a great deal about what the video has to say about gameplay in general (Minamar was the best map, Sanhok was the worst and caused a mass exodus of casual/unskilled players leaving only the sweaty nerds for a few years until more noob-friendly steps were taken like bringing in more larger maps and the introduction of easily-killable bots), he is overhyping how much it “died” for clicks a little. The game’s larger maps still have a very slow pace compared to other games of its type which hasn’t really changed, and the central premise that PUBG is “dead” is incorrect. PUBG reached its popularity peak in the west in the last 2010s before Fortnite arrived and basically took over, however PUBG remains very much alive and one of the top most played games on Steam at the time of writing, it is more popular in Asian countries now than it was during its peak.
The most especially interesting thing about the video above is how effectively it demonstrates that while conventional wisdom dictates that creatives should always act on feedback from their fanbase, there are often situations where paying too much attention to the most popular or vocal feedback can backfire. For instance, a lot of western players of PUBG complain constantly about the game not having more “realistic” (i.e military themed) outfits and how the devs instead constantly are introducing cute stuff like pretty pink clothes and k-pop collabs, this is one of the most common complaints about the game if you read forums, comments sections etc. However the company is just appealing to the Asian market where the game is actually popular and their metrics no doubt show that people love to consume that type of content. What people say on forums and what people actually do are often different things, as any k-pop fan will know. Hence, the IVE collab that we’re looking at now, which definitely falls into that “pink cute stuff that all gamers definitely hate my gosh” category.
PUBG used to be a game that you had to purchase, these days it’s free to play the game itself. Like almost all free-to-play games, the money is made for the company by optional microtransactions. This post isn’t going to go into any real detail about how to play the game, as such. There’s plenty of content out there for people interested in that. It’s also not going to talk about all the cool (or uncool) stuff you can get, there’s plenty of posts about that too. Instead, I’m going to break down the actual money value of the microtransactions in the PUBG X IVE event, and tell you how much you might be spending, so you can decide if it’s even worth the fucking bother.
So in the PUBG X IVE event you have a limited time (from the time of writing until sometime December 2026) within which you can buy IVE-themed reskins for your in-game avatar, custom weapons and other things. None of this stuff has any tactical advantage in the game whatsoever (and pretty skins actually might have a slight disadvantage if trying to play stealthily) but WE WANT TO GET ALL THE IVE SHIT AND LOOK LIKE A K-POP so the real question is: can someone actually do that in PUBG without spending any real money, and if we do have to spend real money, how much?
There’s only one currency that you can buy with real money in PUBG, and that’s called G-coin. Here’s the G-coin prices in the store, in Australian dollars. Subject to change, of course.
Note the “starter package”, this actually gives you 500 G-coin plus a few other things, but you can only buy it once. You’ll notice 500 G-coin is $1.99, but 1050 G-coin is $9.99 – so why is the starter package deal better by a factor of 2.5? Market research shows that people who never spend in a game are often not ever likely to because they are wary of being ripped off (gosh can’t imagine why that would be), but people who spend once are more likely to then spend again in future as their initial resistance to spending has been broken. This is why all games with microtransactions these days have a very attractive “ice-breaker” deal to get you the player into the habit of spending.
If you’re me, you’re not going to do this though, instead you’re going to go straight to the IVE store page to see how to get IVE stuff.
You can’t directly just buy the IVE stuff. Instead you have to buy and open crates (called “IVE cargo” but I’ll just call them crates), which have a chance of containing the IVE stuff, or they could contain some other shit that you don’t want. By the girls’ socks you’ll see that you can immediately open a crate with 250 G-coin.
Clicking “view details” takes you to a page where you can view the probabilities of getting an IVE item. PUBG are not doing this to be nice, they’re doing it because this is a legal requirement, you can thank the Chinese government for setting this precedent, so thanks, Winnie. Here’s all the probabilities of getting an IVE item:
So you have a 1.2% chance of getting an IVE member full face and outfit, 0.9% chance of getting some sort of IVE themed equipment, or a 1.5% chance of getting an emote. All up, a 3.6% chance, per crate, of getting something IVE-related, so that’s one crate in about 27.7, on average.
At 250 G-coin per crate, this means that, on average, you would need to spend 6944 G-coin to get an IVE item. This is not a guarantee though, as PUBG does not appear to have a “pity mechanic” with this event, which is a system in some games with random loot drops where after a certain amount of expenditure the game automatically rolls a highest-tier item for you. If they do have a pity mechanic, it isn’t disclosed, but PUBG seem to shy away from disclosing pity mechanics completely these days, probably thanks to being legally punished for advertising one during their previous NewJeans event that didn’t actually work.
It’s impossible to put 6944 G-coin back into dollar value exactly, because it all depends on how much you bought the G-coin for. But here’s how much it would actually cost me in Australian dollars to buy enough G-coin to get an IVE item, at the four different G-coin price points:
However since there’s no pity mechanic, you could spend 6944 G-coin, or any amount of G-coin, and get nothing that you want. It’s also possible to roll multiple of exactly the same item, but since in the game you only have one character, there’s no reason to have more than one item, and you can’t sell them to other players either.
Now there are other ways to get to the IVE items, but they are complicated and deliberately difficult to understand. This is by design – game companies use stacked layers of microtransactions and currency conversions to obfuscate the amount of real money that you’re actually spending on the game. It’s exploiting behavioural psychology, and these companies know exactly what they’re doing. I’ll try to break things down simply.
How to get them:
What it does:
Each IVE cargo ticket can be used to buy and open one crate, so it’s the same as buying a crate directly. It’s just a way for the game to attach a numerical token system to the crate-openings. Using each ticket also grants 15 IVE tokens.
What should I do with these:
Use them immediately. They have no value just sitting around in your inventory.
How to get them:
What it does:
All the stuff that’s in the IVE crates, you can also buy in the “special crafting” store with IVE tokens, without having to “dice roll” for it, you just pick the item you want. The catch is that you have to open a hell of a lot of crates to get enough tokens to buy the best IVE stuff. How many?
You might possibly get enough tokens for at least one IVE emote, but to get at least 1000 tokens (to directly buy the weapon or equipment packs) or 2000 tokens (to directly buy a full set of clothes for your IVE bias) you need to spend up big. The system is designed so that players not willing to spend money on G-coin will always fall well short of getting the best items with tokens before the event runs out of time, so the tokens are there to:
By the time you’ve spent enough on crates to get all these tokens, you’ve probably already got half the really good stuff anyway just by opening those crates, as due to the odds, a successful roll of an outfit set or other good item is likely to kick in much sooner (approx 28 attempts) than the amount of crate openings required to generate enough tokens to buy the best items directly (67 or 134 attempts). So the tokens really function as a supplemental bonus for people already willing to pay, rather than something a free-to-play player can use to buy the best items.
Well, I’m broke so that sucks – what should I do with the tokens, then?
Unless you’ve got enough of them to buy something you want, nothing. Especially do not buy tickets with tokens, as a ticket costs 200 tokens but only refunds 15 when opened. Hang onto your tokens instead, they will build up. Check how many you have on the final day of the event, and spend the tokens on tickets only on the final day of the event (or the last day you could be fucked playing this shit, whatever comes first) to get more crate chances for IVE stuff if you can afford nothing else good with them in the special crafting store at that point.
Step-up packs are the other way you can buy tokens and tickets. The catch (because of course there has to be one, because PUBG can’t ever be consumer-friendly, oh hell no) is that you have to buy them in order, and you can only buy them once.
These are a better deal than buying normal crates so if you were going to spend G-coin on the IVE event, spend it here first. Here’s the actual G-coin cost, per item that you receive:
You would think that the deal would improve as the packs get higher but it’s actually the opposite – the first Step Up pack is the best one, and the higher packs get progressively worse! This is another example of giving the player a better deal in the first instance to generate a paying customer, who will then hopefully spend more later on at something closer to the “intended prices”, except this one’s even more devious because the price difference per item isn’t made as obvious. However even the most expensive Step Up pack at 150 G-coin per crate is still a better deal than opening crates with G-coin one by one for 250 G-coin each.
The full spend of $35.68 on all four packs at the most inefficient spending rate works out to about $0.69 per crate, that’s still a much better deal than the much dearer $2.23 from buying individual crates with G-coin, using the most efficient (and most expensive) G-coin purchasing option.
Note that when you do finally receive the items, with the gun set you receive the items as-is straight away, but with outfit sets and emotes, what you get is an item “imprint” which then has to be “crafted”, using yet another currency called credits, to put the items in your inventory.
The (relatively) good news is that these credits are free. As you play PUBG the game is constantly throwing you free credits, as well as other item imprints for stuff that you might not want (and probably don’t). Items that you’re not interested in, instead of crafting them as per above, you can “disassemble” the imprints, which turns them into credits, which can then be used to craft the items you do want. PUBG tends to spam you with items you don’t give a shit about so it doesn’t take long to build up the 23,200 credits required to craft the IVE sets. Just don’t disassemble the stuff you actually want to craft by mistake, as that’s surprisingly easy to do with the game’s unintuitive crafting interface.
The game has a bunch of other currencies too, such as scrap, polymers, contraband tickets, etc… but none of this can be redeemed for IVE stuff as far as I can tell, so don’t worry about these, if you focus on the currencies mentioned earlier, then you should be fine. Or not fine, as the case may be.
I guess it depends. If you’re an IVE fan but not a gamer and don’t get any pleasure from computer games, it’s really not worth playing PUBG just to participate in this nonsense. If you’re an avid player of the game, your mileage may vary. I was lucky in that I had a whole stack of G-coin just sitting around from when PUBG refunded me G-coin for a bunch of items I’d previously acquired that they were discontinuing, so I was able to purchase the first three step-up packs and I got lucky enough to roll the Rei set. G-coin can’t be converted back into real money, so I thought I might as well use it and see what happens. Then the amount of tokens I got from that plus other freebie PUBG stuff (daily login bonuses, etc) was enough to roll more crates to get the Yujin set, as well as generate 1000 credits for the weapons pack. But I wouldn’t have done that if it were not free for me, because I wouldn’t have seen the value. This is also a heads up that if you used to play PUBG and now don’t but are thinking of starting again because of this event, it’s worth logging in and checking your inventory just to see if you have a bunch of free G-coin just sitting there unused like I did. But should you pay for this? I guess that’s up to you, but at least now you know what you can realistically expect from it.
The last thing to consider is that k-pop collabs seem to be a thing that PUBG does from time to time. There have previously been big collabs like this with Blackpink, NewJeans and aespa, as well as smaller items that you can buy related to Seo Eve, Allday Project and others. So if you like k-pop but happen to think IVE fucking sucks, you can always save your G-coin for another group in the future that you actually give a shit about. That’s all for this post – Kpopalypse will return!
