VTV3 Speaks on Esports Law and Governance After the Himass and TanVuu Penalties

On the global PUBG player registry, the names Himass and TanVuu are still there, but their status cells have gone grey. Krafton issued a penalty barring the two Vietnamese players from the entire global PUBG tournament system. What came alongside the penalty was a void: nobody knows exactly which clause they breached, what steps the disciplinary process involved, or which level signed off on the decision. On the other side, a community campaign gathered more than 4.1 million signatures demanding justice for the pair. By the time VTV3 put the case on air, the story had outgrown a single penalty and touched a larger question: in esports, who actually holds the power to judge?

PUBG is owned by Krafton, a South Korean publisher. In this operating model, Krafton writes the competitive rules, runs the tournaments, and issues the penalties — three roles folded into one hand.

Traditional sports split those three roles across three different bodies. National and international federations draft the statutes. Organisers run the events. Disciplinary committees adjudicate, and an independent court of arbitration hears appeals. Esports has no such fourth tier. In most titles, the rule-writing layer and the sentencing layer sit inside the same publisher — the only party that controls the servers, the patches, and the tournament rights.

The management teams of Himass and TanVuu have filed appeals. The scope of the penalty is notable because it does not stop at one event: it applies across the entire global PUBG tournament system and, according to reports, extends to a showmatch — an exhibition format with no qualification stakes and no meaningful prize pool.

VTV3 did not rule on whether the two players were right or wrong. The broadcaster raised a different question: which rule was breached, and was the handling process ever disclosed. That framing matters, because it moves the debate away from who is guilty and toward how the system operates.

The first layer is scope. A ban covering all international events sits in the widest category of competitive sanctions, second only to a lifetime ban. It works like a centralised eligibility registry: a single decision takes effect across every event, every region, for the duration of the ban. As governance, that is a powerful and convenient instrument. As due process, it is also the hardest kind of sanction to contest, because there is no other forum in which to ask for a re-hearing.

The second layer is proportionality by event tier. When a rulebook designed for official competition is applied down to a showmatch, the gap between the gravity of the conduct and the consequence stretches. Traditional sports federations usually maintain separate codes for friendlies, pre-season fixtures and official matches, with different sanction scales. Esports has largely not built that stratification, so the question of which tier a penalty was designed for remains open.

The third layer, and the heaviest, is procedural transparency. VTV3's demand targets the inputs of the decision: what was breached, through which steps, at which level. When one organisation drafts the rules, runs the arena and delivers the verdict, that same organisation becomes a party with an interest in the outcome. No speculation about intent is required; the structure itself generates a conflict of interest. A publisher cannot hold the pen that writes the law, the whistle that runs the match, and the gavel that delivers the sentence, and still keep the trust of the whole system. An appeals mechanism exists, but the appeal is handled by the very party that issued the penalty, and the independence of that review tier has never been published. A penalty without a written document is like a play with the replay missing: the outcome may be right, but nobody can verify it.

The fourth layer is regional standing. Vietnam has just won its first esports medal at the ASIAD stage, and its audience is large enough for a community campaign to gather more than 4.1 million signatures with national television stepping in. The region's competitive capacity and public pull are rising fast; its governance capacity is not moving at the same speed. When a publisher both writes the rules and delivers the verdict, the entire tournament system becomes a side map of a single entity. Based on my experience following PUBG events across Southeast Asia over several seasons, disciplinary disputes here tend to end in silence rather than in paperwork, and every silence costs the rulebook another sliver of weight.

Two things that are often blurred together need separating here: a lack of transparency, and innocence. Much of the community has already assumed the two players were wronged before any rule was published. That is a conclusion reached while the facts are still empty, and it creates a reverse obligation: if Krafton later publishes the rule and evidence serious enough, most of that audience will have to reverse course, and trust in the community's voice will lose value along with it.

A wrong decision and a bad outcome also need separating. A penalty can be issued with proper authority, under a proper rule, and still feel unfair to fans. Conversely, a fully disclosed process can still lead to an outcome nobody wants. Blaming the publisher every time an outcome is bad is the easiest way to read a game, and also the way that misses the most.

The third concern is the regional framing. The case has been packaged as a Vietnam-versus-Korea drama, and when a disciplinary dispute becomes a national confrontation, both sides lose the ability to read it as a governance problem. A derby is not a match, it is a ranked game with lives on the line — whoever tilts first loses first. Here, the one tilting could be anyone holding a keyboard.

Finally, more than 4.1 million signatures is a strong data point about attention, not about substance. Community signatures measure heat, not right and wrong, and a large number never automatically becomes a correct argument.

What is worth keeping from this case is not who wins the appeal. It is that a tournament-level penalty has forced an entire esports scene to ask whose rulebook it is competing under, and whether that rulebook exists as a readable document. While that answer is blank, every outcome is technically correct and morally wrong. That is the patch worth shipping before any other update.