We’re racing toward a world where Fortnite and Roblox could rival Steam and the App Store in terms of the size of their game libraries. Both have growing ecosystems of millions of players who build and spend time in custom battle royales, chat rooms, and all kinds of other games. We’re looking at the fight for what could be the next YouTube. 

While the two giants may be the biggest in the space, they are far from the only companies building out a catalog of tools that make the jump from game playing to game making far simpler than traditional game engines Unity or Unreal. All sorts of platforms, including the browser-based dot big bang and the top-down-focused CliCli, are looking for a piece of a market that already holds the attention of hundreds of millions of players. 

“[UGC] is a very critical thing, right?” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney tells The Verge of how user-generated content and his vision of the metaverse mix. “The future is primarily about the work of everybody in the world, and we’re a very small, small part of that.”

Epic confirmed that Fortnite currently carries 70 million monthly average users, while Roblox has reported that 250 million players bounce from game to game every month on its platform. That’s a far cry from the more than 2 billion people who use YouTube every month, but it’s not hard to imagine one or more of these platforms gaining that type of audience in the next 20 years. We’ll likely see the tools and economies of these systems evolve significantly over that time. 

Since the tools that players use to build experiences are simple, many of the games they build are simple as well. The bones of many games found on either Roblox or Fortnite resemble the games that they came from. Other platforms aren’t very different in their complexity, either. Tools have a long way to go before the quality and variety of games can be greater. 

Epic has taken a huge step in that direction with Unreal Editor for Fortnite. It brings some Unreal Engine functionality, including a proprietary coding language in Verse, to Fortnite Creative. The tool has only been available for a couple weeks, and players have already designed portals, made games of custom checkers, and designed maps with visuals that look so stunning that’d you’d hardly know it was Fortnite. 

The showcase at the Game Developers Conference failed to showcase how the Unreal Editor can help Fortnite developers make different kinds of experiences. That’s a key focus for Epic going forward. 

“We need to build a lot more features into the development kit. Right now, there’s a set of APIs, there’s a diverse programming language, and there’s a set of APIs that can use interfaces to enable creating games in a bunch of genres,” Sweeney said about what can be made in Fortnite Creative. “But they don’t expose everything we want to expose. We have a lot of work, a couple years’ worth of work, which will result in improvements and new versions until [we have] essentially everything one would need to have every game genre represented in Fortnite.”

Developers are already doing interesting things with the limited tools available in these platforms. They’ve reshaped Roblox maps into something that looks identical to Call of Duty and turned a Fortnite lobby room into a trivia party. They’ve imported and recreated the terrain from the entire Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild map on a Fortnite Creative island. A handful of developers have even developed their own Spider-Man web-slinging mechanics within Roblox. Those are only a handful of examples of hundreds, and the things players can accomplish with these tools are becoming more complex with every update. The drive to embrace that complexity isn’t as deep, though. 

People looking to make a living on one of these platforms, just like those doing so on YouTube, find themselves at the whim of the platform. These game designers have learned that they need to cater their creations to the audience that’s already there to enjoy Fortnite and Roblox. Making something that’s too different may not succeed. 

“If you grind players too hard on Roblox, they’ll just go play something else. Roblox players play six to eight games in a session,” said Gamefam CEO and founder Joe Ferencz about how players log on to Roblox for a specific type of content. “Roblox will tell you that they have a 2.5-hour average session per player […] and the highest session per game, it’s 25 minutes. You have to be aware that they are jumping around to multiple games, and you have to treat them that way.”

Ferencz, who runs the Roblox studio Gamefam, is one of several game makers who have built a studio that works exclusively within the confines of Roblox. Roadblocks like uneven revenue split numbers and a lack of discoverability on a platform like Roblox make it difficult to bring in money without looking outside the platform for funding. Some of the most successful developers — several of which have come together to form entire studios like Gamefam — in the space rely on branded deals with companies like Coca-Cola, Sega, and the NFL. 

That sort of arrangement isn’t sustainable for the majority of creators, and the platforms may not succeed in the long run if developers can’t find a way to support themselves within them. 

“If you think about YouTube and what it did for video creators, you know, it lets people start small with no barrier to entry. It lets them get a kind of modest income, just kind of do it as a side thing, grow a channel, and then become a full-time creative with equitable pay,” said ControlZee CEO and co-founder Robert Anderberg. “I think that’s really the future, but from my perspective, the thing that we’re focused on is building something that really does pay people equitably.”

Anderberg, whose company currently runs the browser-based UGC platform dot big bang, has been adamant that platforms should give developers a fair share of the revenue. He, and many others in the space, believe that the more platforms do for their people trying to make a living on them, the more they’ll succeed.

That’s the primary motivation behind one of Epic’s big announcements at the Game Developers Conference. The Fortnite creator is now giving its creators 40 percent of revenue from all of Fortnite, including the incredibly popular battle royale mode. Roblox developers earn closer to 25 percent of the money from their creations. Roblox could see Fortnite’s revenue split change as a direct challenge. 

One thing that Sweeney and Epic SVP Sax Persson made clear multiple times is that they believe in an open ecosystem. They believe that Fortnite could become such a sophisticated game-creating tool that players will be able to pull their games off of it and sell them on Steam or elsewhere. The key, they hope, is that creators will be so happy within Fortnite that they won’t want to go elsewhere.

“It’s not a conflict to believe in an open [ecosystem] and still want people to stay in your ecosystem because you’re better than other ecosystems,” Persson said. “I don’t think that’s a conflicting standpoint by having a principle of open but offering the best opportunity for creators. We think that’s a path forward. I don’t think it benefits us to make the transition to another ecosystem really hard. We want people to be here because they want to be here, not because they’re stuck there.”

User-generated content has been a staple of the games industry for decades. Titles like PUBG, Counter-Strike, and Dota 2 began as mods of other games and eventually became global sensations in their own right. The creative energy that drives modders and hobby-level game makers has only become more prevalent today — and now we’re witnessing some of the biggest companies in the space attempt to harness and systemize it within their own ecosystem.

One of the first places Joel Corelitz went when he got off the plane from Chicago was a nearby Home Depot. He wasn’t getting wood, supplies, or power tools for a home renovation project. He was shopping for instruments. Anything he could use to make noise: a paint roller without the brush, a sledgehammer, and pretty much anything that was made of metal. 

“We were just walking around Home Depot and treating it like it was Guitar Center,” Corelitz, who previously scored games like TumbleSeed and Gorogoa, told me. “We probably looked like we were absolutely insane. We were doing things like putting air vents up to our ear and hitting them. Who goes in there and buys one piece of metal ventilation, a heavy rubber mallet, and all sorts of random crap?”

He was stocking up for a three-day recording session in late 2017 in San Mateo, California, for Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s enigmatic new adventure game that stars Norman Reedus. Corelitz, along with Kojima Productions composer Ludvig Forssell and a few others from Sony, needed to find objects that could create sounds that no one could identify.

Read next: Death Stranding review

“Some items were easy to spot, like a frying pan that had a very wispy metallic sound,” Forssell said via a Skype call from Tokyo. “It was something we had to get used to while we were there. I had no idea what to do at first but then I just grabbed a pipe and started banging it against something, without bothering the staff of course.”

Forssell had worked with Kojima to establish an overall feeling for the game’s score, with the main idea that it needed to be unlike anything else. “Hideo handed me the soundtrack for the movie It Follows,” Forssell said. “He wanted it to be dark, he wanted it to be gritty. Then I worked out my own approach to that. Kojima has such a vision with so many details, so I would still get a lot of direction from him. One of those directions was the sound of chains.”

Kojima wanted more than the sounds of chains banging against floors and walls sprinkled throughout the score. He wanted unique sounds that felt familiar and real. That led to the trip to Home Depot and the three-day recording session, something Corelitz was brought on to help coordinate and run. While Forssell and Corelitz had an idea of what they wanted, much of the recording session involved experimentation; putting different objects together to see what kind of noise they would make. 

While it’s hard to create a strict plan for experimentation, Forssell and Corelitz had to come up with an idea of what they wanted to use to make noise before they went into the studio. Corelitz had a few ideas in mind, but there was one thing he knew they would need: a piano they could do anything they wanted to. 

“A piano is the ultimate percussion instrument,” Corelitz said. “We think about the piano as something expressive and delicate, but it’s in the percussion category simply because it’s about the sound of something being struck. It’s this mechanical instrument that strikes a string in a very advanced way. If you open up and get more control over how that string is strung, the possibilities for sound open up so much.”

That’s exactly what they did. They took an upright piano and laid it on its back so the sound hole, a small hole that exposes the strings, was upright. They removed everything around that hole to open the strings up even more. Then they put screws and playing cards between strings, put duct tape over the dampers, put bricks on the sustain pedal, and other sorts of odd customizations. “If you put a screw in between two of the strings it doesn’t sound like a piano anymore,” Corelitz said. “You’ve disrupted the way the piano is going to work. It’s going to sound like a weird, twisted bell.”

It’s called a prepared piano, a concept created by John Cage in the late 1930s. Corelitz made these modifications to make the strings react longer and make more of a dominant sound when struck. They then used a rubber mallet, a rake, and a sledgehammer to hit both the strings and the side of the piano. “Using the rake on the belly of the piano is something that just happened in the moment,” Forssell said. “I’d never done anything like it before.”

The three-day session inspired Forssell to create more sounds with odd objects and modified instruments. He went back to Tokyo and modified his guitar and used things like Styrofoam and a cardboard box to produce more sounds.

Almost a year later, Kojima Productions reached out to Corelitz again, but this time it was to help compose pieces of music for the game using the sounds he had created in San Mateo. Forssell had already written hours of music for Death Stranding, but they needed more so the player wouldn’t hear the same thing too often. 

“When we got to the part where I was writing cues for the game, this is the most oppressive music I’ve ever created,” Corelitz said. “The sounds we created were raw but they don’t sound harsh or digital. They sound big and they have a natural feeling to them. They don’t sound like anything else out there.”

The whole point of the recording session was to create acoustic sounds that felt otherworldly and could be layered throughout the score. The sound of oil drums getting hit with sticks, a rake being dragged over piano strings, and a whole cart full of metal wiring getting shaken all show up on the score. “Everything is everywhere,” Forssell said. “The bigger sounds, like the big piano or oil barrel hits were stingers, some of the stuff I did on my guitar was more tonal, simple percussion sounds, while the paint roller ended up being your faster, clickity, rhythmic stuff.”

It was the perfect balance to Forssell’s compositions that were mostly comprised of synthesizers. Forssell hadn’t worked on music for horror games before but wanted to emulate the sound of It Follows. “I really latched onto the pitchiness of older synths and how out of tune things can sound and still sound musical,” he said. “That really worked well with the idea of the BTs, the darker, more horror-esque parts of the game. I wanted things to sound not-musical but musical at the same time.”

These segments of the score would primarily fit into Death Stranding’s combat sequences with BTs — otherworldly beached things that somehow stranded themselves on Earth — which were broken up into four different tracks. “Each track consists of a different energy level,” Corelitz said. “The highest level of energy is for when you engage the enemy. The lowest level is when you are sneaking around. The two levels in between represent that the enemy might know someone is there. As you’re playing, the music is constantly adjusting between four tracks.”

Forssell wanted the transitions between levels to be subtle to the player. They used a third party audio engine to help build out a system that used some procedural generation. It helped keep the score unique throughout a playthrough. 

“We have a pot full of sounds, it shouldn’t matter what tempo it is or what sound plays after the next one. It should just work together,” he said. “You can’t really identify what the track is while you’re playing; I’m sure people are going to hear the soundtrack and think that they didn’t hear a track like this in-game. It’s not 100 percent procedural, but it is a soup of sounds that has an identity. It’s just supposed to be reactive to the gameplay.”

The end result is a creepy score with layers of synth and sounds. The sounds were edited and mixed to help gel with the synthesizer, but they still fit in well to Death Stranding’s gameplay. “A lot of film scores and game scores are still known for their sense of melody and harmony,” Corelitz said. “Death Stranding isn’t. It’s about unsettling emotion and aggressive unrelenting sensibility. It’s a score that’s based around texture and feel.”

A lot of that texture and feel came from that three-day recording session where they hit a piano with a sledgehammer and a rake. It was something neither composer had done anything like before, but they can’t imagine doing it any other way after the fact. 

“Sometimes the most horrific, twisted things are familiar to us but presented in a way that’s unfamiliar,” Corelitz said. “If you want to make something that’s truly unique, in a lot of ways you can’t start from a blank slate, it needs to have something familiar to provide context. These sounds work because they come from something familiar.”

It was a warm day in Hong Kong in early October, and Derek Kwok was in the midst of talking to his seven-man Overwatch roster about the future. 

The team was attempting to raise enough funds in order to make a 7,200-mile journey across the globe to BlizzCon at the Anaheim Convention Center in California where the Overwatch World Cup would take place in early November. Blizzard had changed the format of the tournament so there would be no regional qualifiers and no way to compete outside of actually traveling to Anaheim. That came with steep costs. 

Kwok, who is the general manager of the Fire Dragons, Hong Kong’s Overwatch World Cup team, set up a fundraiser for $80,000 HKD, which is enough to cover flights and hotels for the entire roster, coaching staff, and support crew as well as a training space for the lead-up to the competition. “We never thought the target would be achievable, even if our target was only able to accommodate the flight and hotel costs of players only,” Kwok told me before BlizzCon. “The Overwatch pro scene in Hong Kong is very small, and the current atmosphere back in Hong Kong made us feel inappropriate to raise funds for ‘playing video games in the US.’”

That atmosphere has been well-documented. Protests erupted in Hong Kong back in June due to a bill that allows individuals to be extradited to China. Those who oppose the bill believe it threatens Hong Kong’s autonomy from China, and even though the bill has since been withdrawn, protests have continued as protesters have brought new demands to the government. 

Kwok started the fundraiser in July, and after a few months, he had barely made any progress. The team had raised nowhere near enough money to reach their goal in time to make the trip possible. It came to a point on October 8th where the team discussed whether they wanted to continue trying at all, but things changed drastically a few hours later. 

”I was working overtime for my day job as a software developer when the madness was happening,” Kwok says. That “madness” happened at a seemingly unrelated e-sports tournament. At the Hearthstone Grandmasters competition, Blizzard had suspended and revoked the prize money of Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai, along with firing two commentators who had introduced him, for yelling “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our age!” in a post-game interview. The internet went into an outrage.

Shortly after the news broke, Team Ireland general manager Andrew Bohan posted Team Hong Kong’s fundraiser to the Overwatch subreddit, and it started to blow up. “I posted it at a time where the entirety of Reddit was going crazy over the Blitzchung scandal and when the general public actually sees and understands the struggle, they will provide help,” Bohan says. “It’s just getting those eyes on it is the hard part and Blizzard royally fucking up was the perfect chance to get the public attention Team Hong Kong needed.” Within a few hours, the team had more than $90,000 raised, which was enough to make it to BlizzCon. 

“That night at 11PM, we had an emergency meeting, and [Hong Kong player Chi-Yeung “Moowe” Yip] was saying, ‘So we have to go,’” Kwok explains, “Then I said, ‘Yes, that’s what people want, and we have to show the best of us in the arena.’” The easiest part was over for Team Hong Kong. Now, they had to keep up with some of the best Overwatch talent in the world.

“Hong Kong has yet to win an official World Cup match to date,” Overwatch commentator and analyst Kevin “AVRL” Walker told me ahead of BlizzCon. “They currently sit with a total record of zero wins, one draw, and seven loses over two group stage appearances [over the last three World Cups]. Their first win of 2019 would already be a notable improvement on past years, however. Making a deeper run in the tournament in comparison to their other Pacific neighbors would be a strong benchmark to achieve. With Team Japan, Team Chinese Taipei, and Team Thailand all looking very strong, Hong Kong will have their work cut out for them.”

The action started before the hubbub of Blizzard’s annual convention. While BlizzCon’s opening ceremonies took place on the afternoon of November 1st, the preliminary rounds began on Thursday, October 31st, when Team Hong Kong would face off against Team Paraguay in their first match. 

Team Paraguay’s Fabrizio “Zio” Liviere was flying high in the sky above the first point on Overwatch’s Hollywood map, waiting for Team Hong Kong to try to overtake his squad. Only a few seconds later, the entire Fire Dragons squad rushed around the corner and onto the point. Hong Kong player Chi-Yeung “Moowe” Yip knew that Liviere would be a pest, disrupting his squad’s push onto the point. Most teams tend to rely on heroes like McCree, Widowmaker, or Soldier 76 to take out high-soaring Pharahs, but Yip didn’t want to wait. He took out Mei’s endothermic blasters and started firing off icicles toward Liviere. On the fourth shot, he connected, dropping the jetpacked soldier. Seconds later, Team Hong Kong nearly team-wiped Paraguay and captured the first point. 

They went on to shut the South American squad out. 

“It was amazing,” Kwok told me after the match. “That’s the first win in four years of participating in the Overwatch World Cup. The team was hyped. We tried our best playing against all the teams, even to the weaker teams like Paraguay, so we feel it is a well-deserved win.”

The Fire Dragons didn’t have much time to rest since their next match against Team Germany would be held the same day. Germany was a much tougher team; they had competed in every Overwatch World Cup qualifier since 2016. The two squads clashed head-on in one early moment on Overwatch’s Eichenwalde map as a small room overlooking the control point was packed with nearly every member of both teams. Shields, immortality fields, and bullets were flying in both directions. Hong Kong needed to push the Germans back in order to defend the control point and prevent their enemy from scoring. 

Over the course of a few seconds, Kin-Long “ManGoJai” Wong took out the enemy Bapiste’s immortality field, which prevented Team Germany’s players’ health from dropping below 20 percent, paving the way for a near team-wipe to push the Germans back. The importance of that moment would fall to the wayside as Team Germany powered their way through the Fire Dragons, ultimately defeating them 3-0. The match was closer than the score indicates, though. 

“I didn’t really have them on the radar before the World Cup because they got pushed into our bracket on short notice. But after playing them I can say that it wasn’t an easy game,” Team Germany head coach Julian “ProGi” Maier told me after the match. “Their Mei and Reaper composition were quite good…you can see that they punished us whenever we were slacking.”

“It was close,” Kwok said. “We had back-and-forth team fights, especially in Eichenwalde, where we drained most of their time in the second round of Germany’s attack. We could’ve grabbed one of those moments for victory. [We] were disappointed. Some of us even dropped tears.”

That was the end of the road for Team Hong Kong due to the new structure and ruleset for this Overwatch World Cup; one loss in the preliminary round meant you were going home. But their presence was still felt during the remaining two days of the tournament. In between the Hilton and Marriott hotels, directly leading up to the front entrance to BlizzCon, a small group of protesters stood against Blizzard. They chanted, held banners, and passed out signs and flyers in an attempt to draw attention to what was happening in Hong Kong and, in particular, Blizzard’s actions against Blitzchung. 

“Any team from Hong Kong or Taiwan is going to try harder to play and win,” one masked protester told me as dozens of eager Blizzard fans marched past. “Because China doesn’t want us here and we need to do whatever we can to tell the world that we are still here.”

“I’m proud of them,” she added. The protester, who came all the way to Anaheim from Hong Kong, told me that she had only heard of the Fire Dragons and what they accomplished because of BlizzCon. While they didn’t get nearly as far as they had hoped in the tournament, individual players on Team Hong Kong shined on a bigger stage, and that extra exposure helped bring their message to more people. They didn’t win, but they accomplished a lot by just making it out there.

“I do believe [Kin-Long “ManGoJai” Wong] has proven his capability this year as a clear standout on team Hong Kong as well as performing as a key component in Talon’s [Wong’s amateur team] success in Contenders and the Gauntlet,” Walker told me after the tournament. “He had some big individual moments on heroes like Zenyatta, which doesn’t see a lot of gameplay in this particular meta. And despite not being able to get past Germany, he proved he could stand toe-to-toe with top tier competition at the Gauntlet.”

Walker, Maier, and others I spoke to believe that, outside of Wong and Yip, other members of the Fire Dragons still have a ways to go before making the leap to the Overwatch League, but competing on the international stage is a step in the right direction. In addition to getting experience and exposure on one of the biggest stages in Overwatch, Kwok and Team Hong Kong were covered by outlets like ESPN and The Washington Post. They brought more attention to what’s happening in Hong Kong by making the journey to BlizzCon.

”At a time like this, my team and I think the best way to express ourselves is to continue to play in the tournament,” Kwok told me. “Trying our best and showing the great Hong Kong spirits of never giving up are a demonstration of strength already.”

I asked Kwok if he thought he and his squad made an impact during their short stay in Anaheim. “Let the fans speak for themselves,” he said. “We think we have given fans a place to express their support to us and Hong Kong.”

Bloody and beaten, Nguyen “Leviz” Huu Doan hunkered down on the second floor of a decrepit hospital across from Duong “Sapauu” Cam Hoa, waiting for the right chance to strike. The rest of their PUBG squad had been killed, and neither Leviz nor Sapauu knew how much longer they had left. The sound of gunfire was coming from every direction.

Only a moment later, three rugged Americans stormed the stairs of the hospital with guns drawn. As soon as they hit the second floor, they turned down the hall toward Sapauu. Seeing an opportunity, Leviz emptied a clip in their direction. Disoriented from Team Vietnam’s split position, the American squad was finished by Sapauu and eliminated from the first match of the PUBG Nations Cup’s second day.

Read next: The creator of PUBG thinks its future is in e-sports

“We didn’t feel any pressure going into the tournament. We can get accustomed to any environment we get put in,” Team Vietnam coach Lê Đức “DjChip” Anh told me through a translator after the first day of the competition. “No matter what situation we’re in we’ll do our best. Our first win is only the beginning.”

Sixteen teams consisting of players from 16 countries gathered in Seoul, South Korea, for the first PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Nations Cup at the Jangchung Arena earlier this month. Team Vietnam finished fourth overall in the tournament, netting $44,000 in prize money, after dominating some of the best players in the world from countries like Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Vietnam’s stellar performance was an impressive accomplishment, especially considering that tournaments aren’t even legal in the country. 

The scene was vastly different three months earlier when Leviz was denied the chance to compete at FACEIT Global Summit, one of the biggest PUBG tournaments to date, after his visa was rejected by the British High Commission in New Delhi. Reasons for the rejection weren’t clear, as developer PUBG Corp. had helped confirm Leviz’s documentation and reason to travel to London.

“Obviously, I was pretty sad and disappointed when I found out that I couldn’t compete. I wasn’t expecting the rejection,” Leviz told me. “But now that we’re allowed to compete here, I think we can take the accomplishments we’ve gained in Vietnam and do the same here. We have high hopes.”

While the rejection was disappointing for Leviz, it wasn’t anything new. Other Vietnamese players had previously been rejected from tournaments like the Grand Slam PUBG Global Event. Visa issues have haunted other e-sports in the region as well, due to the complicated nature of the US and UK’s visa application processes.

That’s not the worst aspect of participating in the competitive battle royale scene in Vietnam, though: PUBG does not have a license from the Vietnamese government, meaning local tournaments are run illegally. “In Vietnam, we’re working with partners to host events rather than host them ourselves. That’s due to multiple reasons and one of them is that we don’t have a government-issued game license,” PUBG e-sports director Jake Sin said. “That bars us from a lot of activities that take place there.”

The Vietnam Divine Championship, one of the biggest PUBG competitions in the country, was canceled due to the licensing issue in April. Its abrupt end has led some to worry about how sustainable the scene is in Vietnam. It’s not clear why PUBG hasn’t received a commercial license in Vietnam. (We asked PUBG Corp. if there are plans to go through official channels to receive that license, but we haven’t received a clear answer.) 

Even with that huge disadvantage, a vibrant community of passionate players and fans has grown and continues to grow in Vietnam. More than 80,000 viewers tuned in to a special Vietnamese YouTube stream of the PUBG Nations Cup, and more than 50,000 people tune in regularly to local weekly tournaments. 

“We looked at each country by their player base, e-sports viewership, and the number of pro players competing at the highest level within the nine regions we support,” Sin said. “There’s a robust e-sports ecosystem in Vietnam. You’d be surprised. There are huge viewership numbers, a lot of country-level tournaments, and there are always many Vietnamese fans watching international events. Vietnamese players have also really stepped up. They are one of the strongest countries in Southeast Asia.”

Sin isn’t exaggerating: Vietnamese teams, despite the issues they encounter within their country and when trying to travel to international tournaments, continuously place high in regional tournaments against Korean, Chinese, and Japanese teams. Those who have played against the Vietnamese teams know how talented they are. 

Team Vietnam — comprised of Refund Gaming’s Trần “Nhism” Thái Linh; Cerberus Esports’ Ngoc “BAsill” Bao An; as well as Leviz and Sapauu, who compete for Divine Esports and Sky Gaming Daklak, respectively — made their way to Seoul for the Nations Cup knowing they had less experience and resources than most other teams there. But in the first match of the entire tournament, after 13 other teams had fallen to the wayside, Leviz and Sapauu handled Team Chinese Taipei and Germany swiftly to win the match and grab a chicken dinner. They finished first in that match to a shocked crowd at Jangchung Arena and racked up 62 kills over the course of the three-day event.

“Vietnam definitely came out strong. It’s game one, so if you hit your stride and get a couple breaks, you get the confidence early on,” said Team USA’s Keane “Valliate” Alonso. “To start an event like that, it’s easy to roll with it and feel like you could dominate the whole world.”

Vietnamese players had been known for their aggressive playstyle, opting to take other teams head-on early in the match whenever possible. It’s not something that’s vastly different from other teams, but European and North American teams had little to no experience playing against any Vietnamese players. They didn’t completely know what to expect. 

Their quick tempo strategy worked at times — like during the easy finish to the tournament’s opening match — but it also failed them. At one point during the end of the third match of the tournament, only four teams remained, each sitting on a different edge of the circle. Team Vietnam jumped into three vehicles in a mad rush to find better cover within the safe zone. But only moments after emerging from a cluster of houses, Leviz, Sapauu, and BAsill were immediately lit up and taken out by gunfire from Finland, Russia, and the United States. It was a bold move that fell completely flat. “We were trying to go for the win there,” Leviz said. “But we had some kind of misunderstanding between us, and it didn’t work as intended.”

Mistakes are warranted as the PUBG Nations Cup is different compared to other tournaments. While it has the same standard ruleset as other official tournaments, players only compete in 15 matches, whereas other competitions contain more. Each team was also made up of all-star players who don’t play together regularly (with two players being chosen for their achievements and two getting picked up through a vote) meaning most squads were rusty with their game plans. The cup is a first for the competitive scene, but that doesn’t take away the fantastic performances showcased over the course of the event.

“I’ve cast for Vietnamese teams before at PGL in Bucharest, Team Divine. The first time I watched them, they stood out to everyone, they were just nuts,” North American PUBG caster Mike “Porosaurus” Navarro told me after commentating a day two match in Seoul. “They would see another team in a house, and they would just full four man crash it. They would team fight anybody. It didn’t go so well for them the first time. But the second time, three or four months later, they started winning fights and showing that they could play.

“We’ve seen them improving,” he added. “But the question was always: can they do it on a big world stage like this? Was the stuff before a fluke or is their scene getting better and better? Now, after other tournaments and this, people realize that these guys, as well as the others from Southeast Asia, can compete and win.”

Ultimately, Leviz and crew couldn’t keep up with the high-flying South Korean and Russian teams who opened a massive score gap between themselves and everyone else. While Team Vietnam is undoubtedly disappointed in themselves for not taking the whole tournament, they should feel pride at how far they’ve come.

“It’s about the pride aspect for them as well. They want people to not disrespect the Southeast Asian region. Unfortunately, in PUBG and in other e-sports, some of the Western teams do disrespect them. They’ll laugh at them,” said Australian PUBG commentator and analyst Jake “ZeNox” Brander, who casted the PUBG Nations Cup. “They’ll feel superior to everyone except South Korea. But this event is a chance for Vietnam to say, ‘Hey, we’re just as good as you guys. We just don’t have the infrastructure, viewers, or whatever, but we can still compete.’ They want the respect, and they’ve got it.”

PUBG e-sports are incredibly popular in many Asian countries, including South Korea, China, and Vietnam, with more long-term plans for growth on the way. So succeeding at the inaugural PUBG Nations Cup, which is effectively the World Cup of the game, is an accomplishment that could turn people’s attention to players like Leviz and Sapauu, possibly encouraging major teams within and outside Vietnam to consider recruiting them. 

“I want to let people know that Vietnam is a strong team,” Leviz said. “Vietnam has great players, and we are here to compete.”