KRAFTON India came out of last weekend with one of the strongest creative-awards runs an Indian gaming brand has put together. The publisher picked up serious metal at both the Abby Awards 2026 at Goafest and the Kyoorius Creative Awards 2026 on the same weekend, with the announcement landing on May 25.
The numbers, briefly
At Abby, KRAFTON India says it took home 34 wins in total: 3 Gold, 19 Silver, 8 Bronze, and 4 Merits. The publisher describes this as making it the second most-awarded brand of the night. The Gold for The Great In-Game Wedding in Brand Experience & Activation was the centrepiece. Industry coverage from Storyboard18’s Abby 2026 wrap separately confirmed Gold wins for The Great In-Game Wedding (via 22Feet Tribal Worldwide) and BGMI Career Mode (via Leo India).
Kyoorius was even more lopsided in the publisher’s favour. KRAFTON walked away with 1 Grey Elephant and 15 Blue Elephants. The Great In-Game Wedding alone took seven Blues plus the Grey. Everyone Loves a Good Fight added five more. BGMI South Regional Films picked up two. BGMI Career Mode rounded it out with one.
That is a lot of metal for one brand in one week.
The wedding campaign, for anyone who missed it
This one is worth knowing about even if you only follow the competitive side of BGMI. Two players, Jaspreet and Tanupreet, known in-game as OnFireXVeronica and OnFireXHades, met in BGMI lobbies, fell in love, and decided to get married. KRAFTON and 22Feet Tribal Worldwide turned the actual ceremony into an event hosted inside the game, with the public invited to attend.
The underlying pitch was sharp. Players spend roughly 3x more time in BGMI lobbies than in actual combat, which makes the lobby less of a waiting room and more of a social space. The campaign has been picking up hardware for months. It earned Cannes Lions 2025 shortlists in Entertainment Lions for Gaming and has been entered again for Cannes 2026.
Most brands would have killed the idea in the pitch room. KRAFTON greenlit it. The metal count is the receipt.
What the other three winning campaigns did
Everyone Loves a Good Fight picked up five Blue Elephants at Kyoorius. BGMI South Regional Films, which is exactly what it sounds like, took two more, and the South India focus is worth flagging because that audience has quietly become a much bigger slice of the BGMI player base than metro-centric coverage usually admits.
The one to circle is BGMI Career Mode. Gold at Abby, one Blue Elephant at Kyoorius, and built entirely in-house by KRAFTON India’s own creative and product teams. No agency on the credits. The campaign is described as an AI-powered psychometric experience, which sounds like a buzzword sandwich until you see the awards record. In-house creative work winning at India’s top festivals is rare in any category. In gaming, it is almost unheard of. KRAFTON India is clearly treating internal creative as a real capability, and the inaugural KRAFTON India Awards earlier this year suggests that ambition is not stopping at marketing.
The agency stack behind it
The wins came out of a multi-agency setup that includes 22Feet Tribal Worldwide, Enormous Brands, Leo India, and KRAFTON India’s own team. Leo India itself was named Creative Agency of the Year at Abby 2026, so KRAFTON tying its work to that pipeline is part of why the metal count sits where it does.
KRAFTON India says BGMI has now won at five consecutive global and national creative festivals in the past 12 months: ADFEST 2026, Cannes Lions 2025, Spikes Asia 2025, One Show Asia 2025, and now Abby and Kyoorius 2026. Most consumer brands in the country would trade salary bands to put that streak together.
The bigger story underneath the wins is positioning. BGMI has spent years fighting the “addiction and violence” perception bucket, the same fight that cost PUBG Mobile its India presence in 2020. Every campaign in this winning slate is aimed at the social, communal, human side of the platform. The wedding, the regional films, the lobby insight that powered the whole thinking. None of it is shooting-game advertising. All of it is about who shows up to play.
It is also happening at a moment when the BGMI competitive scene is on a serious upswing, with BMPS 2026 running a Rs 2 crore+ prize pool and two Esports World Cup 2026 slots up for grabs. The marketing wins and the esports push are not separate projects. They are the same brand argument hitting the audience from different angles. KRAFTON India’s BGMI esports ecosystem pulled over 930 million views in 2025, so the audience is plainly there to catch the message.
The open question is what every other Indian gaming brand does about it. They have been quiet at Goafest for years. They will not be able to stay quiet for many more.