VTV3, the Himass – TanVuu penalties and the governance gap in Vietnamese esports: when the publisher writes the rules, runs the tournament and passes the sentence

One afternoon, a Vietnamese PUBG player is said to have cried, then deleted the game from their computer. I was not there to witness that moment. But fourteen years of watching esports taught me one thing: when a young person deletes a game, they rarely delete an application. They delete a future they thought they were holding in their hands.

At the other end of the same story, VTV3 spoke up. The national broadcaster did not convict, and did not defend. It asked only two seemingly administrative questions: what exactly did these two players violate, and how was the case processed. It sounds like procedure. But to me, it is a scalpel placed exactly on esports' biggest tumour — one the whole industry knows about but rarely names.

Behind the penalties given to Himass and TanVuu, behind 4.1 million signatures demanding justice, behind the tears, there is a power structure operating the way professional football abandoned more than a century ago: an organisation that writes the rules, runs the tournament and passes the sentence all at once. That organisation is called Krafton.

Context: when a showmatch becomes the centre of an entire sport

To understand why this story spread so fast, it must be placed where it belongs. This is PUBG, a battle royale owned and operated by Krafton, a South Korean publisher. In the battle royale model, the publisher is not merely a seller of a game. It patches the game, runs the competitive servers, writes the rulebook, organises events and — in this case — signs the penalty. All inside one corporate body.

The two named players, Himass and TanVuu, are Vietnamese. The sanction against them did not stop at a domestic event or a regional one. According to what VTV3 and the community recorded, the penalty applies to all Krafton-backed global PUBG tournaments — in other words, the widest suspension a publisher can issue without a total lifetime ban.

What caught my attention was not the severity but the setting in which it was applied. There are signals that the incident was tied to an exhibition-type match — a showmatch — rather than an official ranked event. That is the crux. If a sanction designed for professional competition is dropped onto a friendly-tier event, the question is no longer "who is right". The question becomes: which rulebook is being applied to which tournament tier?

And then the community reacted. Not with a few comments. With 4.1 million signatures demanding justice. I keep that figure unchanged because it shows something important: this is not a fringe event. A national broadcaster entered, major streamers such as Độ Mixi and PewPew weighed in, and the story was framed as a "Vietnam–Korea PUBG drama". When an esports incident reaches national television, it has passed beyond the gamer community. It becomes public debate.

Core analysis: the architecture of power behind a penalty

Look at the structure rather than the people. This is what I always try to do. Esports, organisationally, lacks what football, athletics or tennis all have: an independent federation with the power to enact and enforce rules, separate from tournament organisers. In football, FIFA and the continental confederations write the laws while organisers run the events. There is separation — never perfect, but at least in principle an entity stands above all with a common rulebook.

Esports has no such structure. In a publisher-owned model like PUBG, Krafton holds three roles at once: lawmaker, tournament organiser, and sanctioning authority. When those three sit inside one legal entity, every dispute risks becoming a closed circle: the sanctioned party appeals to the very authority that sanctioned them.

I am not saying Krafton acted wrongly. I am saying the architecture itself produces a sense of injustice, even when each individual decision is reasonable. In such a system, legitimacy is not guaranteed by the good faith of the operator, but by procedural transparency. That is exactly where VTV3 put its finger.

The national broadcaster did not declare the players innocent. It did not say who was right. It demanded something else: that the public know precisely what was violated and how the process unfolded. And it extended that demand even to a showmatch — meaning down to the lowest tournament tier, where, in my view, the rules still sit in a grey zone. In many titles, exhibition-event rules are far thinner than championship rules. Yet a sanction designed for championships fell there. That asymmetry is what almost nobody names.

I once heard an assistant coach joke in a corridor of an empty arena after a pandemic season: "the stadium is empty, but I still hear the crowd that never came." Today I think about that line differently. The stadium is not empty. But the crowd's voice is now rising somewhere the organiser no longer controls: social platforms, online petitions, television bulletins. When public opinion enters, the publisher's power is no longer the only power.

One structurally interesting point: the players' managing teams have filed appeals. That means a representation layer already exists within the Vietnamese PUBG ecosystem — an intermediary class between player and publisher. Its existence is a positive signal of professionalisation. But it also raises the question of the appeal mechanism: when a player appeals, who judges? If the answer is the same publisher that issued the original penalty, that is not an independent arbitration mechanism. It is self-review.

And here is the point I want to anchor: the community calls this "justice", but what it really is is fear digitised into signatures. Fear that a young person can be erased from the international stage by a process they never get to see. That fear is systemic, and it is legitimate.

Look at the regional backdrop to see why this story weighs so heavily. Vietnam won its first-ever esports medal at the ASIAD. That is a milestone pulling Vietnamese esports from the periphery to the centre of continental sport. But a sport can have world-class athletes while still having an adolescent governance system. That is the classic emerging-region pattern: competitive capacity and audience pull grow faster than institutional capacity. The light of the ASIAD medal and the light of this penalty illuminate the same picture — a picture with two clearly contrasting zones of light and shadow.

I write these lines from Paris, where I live and work, but I was born in the Philippines. That distance gives me a strange vantage point: seeing Southeast Asian esports with an eye both inside and outside. And what I see here is a familiar paradox. The region has fervent audiences, talented players, mainstream media interest — yet lacks institutions mature enough to handle conflict. When an incident erupts, there is no sports court to adjudicate. Only two parties and a void.

Consider three scenarios. The worst case: the penalty stands, the appeal is rejected, and the procedural questions go unanswered. Then the narrative "the publisher writes the rules and passes the sentence" will be nailed into community memory, and every future penalty will be viewed with suspicion before it is even explained. The middle case: Krafton discloses the breached rule and the procedural steps, partially satisfying VTV3's demand, and the story settles within weeks. The most optimistic case: the appeal partly succeeds, and the incident becomes a catalyst for a clearer process — even for showmatches.

If you ask me where to bet, I choose the second, with a sliver of hope for the third. The reason is simple: governance incidents rarely end in revolution. They end in small amendments, written so that next time nobody has to cry and delete the game.

Contrarian angle: when the crowd judges before the facts are spoken

This is where I must say something a sports commentator seldom wants to say in front of their own audience.

4.1 million signatures is an eloquent signal of community feeling. But it is not evidence. And there is a dangerous gap between those two things. At this point, the specific rule breached has not been clearly disclosed. Even VTV3 — the outlet that spoke forcefully on the case — did not declare the players innocent; it demanded transparency. Yet most of the community has already cast the two players as victims. That is an emotional verdict delivered before an indictment.

I do not blame the community. Outrage at a closed process is legitimate, and sympathy for young athletes is a very human reaction. But precisely for that reason, I want to split two issues apart. The first issue is process: it is opaque, and that must be challenged. The second issue is conduct: it has not been clearly established, and that requires patience.

Mixing these two issues is the most common mistake of sports public opinion. When we fuse them, we turn a demand for systemic reform — a demand that is entirely reasonable and carries historical weight — into an advocacy campaign for individuals. And an advocacy campaign is easily dismissed when the final evidence arrives, even when it is right in principle.

This is where I recall a line I use when analysing standings: "rankings are just how people retell what they do not yet understand." Here, the 4.1 million signatures are the same. They are how the community retells an outrage that has not been fully interpreted. They do not tell us what actually happened. They only tell us that trust in the system is running out.

There is a test I always apply to myself: if tomorrow Krafton published a clear rule with evidence that the two players committed a serious breach, how would the community react? If the answer is "we still do not believe it", then the problem is no longer the two players. It is the organisation itself. Conversely, if that rule proved innocence, the story becomes a stain that must be erased.

Both scenarios point the same way: what needs reforming first is a sport's capacity to disclose its process, not two individuals' capacity to be exonerated.

I also want to address the framing of this as a "Vietnam–Korea drama". That framing creates a sense of tension, but it distorts the nature of the problem. The publisher is headquartered in South Korea, but the issue is not bilateral relations. It is a global structural problem: a multinational publisher applies its rules across local communities with different levels of institutional maturity. Personalising it into a two-nation confrontation only makes it more inflammatory without solving anything.

Open conclusion: a wound that must be closed by process

If VTV3 is right on one point only, it is this: a sport cannot long survive on a mechanism where every dispute ends at the very authority holding the highest power of judgment. Football wrestled with this for a century and learned that legitimacy comes not from the greatness of the ruler, but from the transparency of the rules.

For Vietnamese PUBG, this incident can be a footnote in esports history, or a milestone. It becomes a footnote if the two players are released, the crowd is happy, and nobody amends anything. It becomes a milestone if it forces the industry to write a clear process for the lowest tournament tier and to create an appeal mechanism independent of the publisher.

I will keep following the case. Not because I want to know who is right in a showmatch. But because I want to know whether Asian esports, after years of growing through enormous numbers, has reached the point of learning to govern itself. The answer to that question will matter more than any penalty.

And if a young person crying and deleting a game can be replaced by them reading exactly what they violated, then I think that is already a step forward for this whole sport.