VTV3 Speaks Out on Esports Law and Governance: When the Publisher Writes the Rules, Runs the Event, and Judges the Case

I sat in front of a screen at 2 a.m., my call log filled with late-night conversations with people inside the industry, and a single number on the paper in front of me that I could not erase: 4.1 million. That is the number of signatures the Vietnamese PUBG community collected to demand justice for Himass and TanVuu, two Vietnamese players who had just been banned by Krafton from every global PUBG tournament. People say I write to shock, but I only describe what they turn their eyes away from. And in this story, what got turned away from is not the penalty. It is how the penalty was issued: not a line of explanation, not a named rule, not a published process. Then VTV3 spoke. A national broadcaster stepped into a game that until then had been held by online communities and streamers alone. When that happened, the story stopped being about two players. It became the story of an entire industry. In football, a suspended player is handled by a federation, under public rules, with the right of appeal to an independent sports tribunal. FIFA does not simultaneously own the Premier League, run every match, and issue individual suspensions. There is a separation of powers. Esports has no such separation. Krafton is the publisher of PUBG. Krafton sets the competition rules. Krafton organises the international events. And when there is a violation, Krafton is also the one who issues the penalty. Three roles concentrated in one entity, with no independent arbitration body standing above to oversee it. This is not a PUBG-only problem. Riot Games does the same with League of Legends: it writes the rules, runs Worlds, and punishes players. Valve does the same with Dota 2 and Counter-Strike. At the global level, there is no independent esports federation with binding disciplinary power; only voluntary, advisory associations with no authority to impose rulings. In Vietnam, this structure becomes glaringly obvious as players gain visibility. Himass and TanVuu are not unknown names. They are influential figures in the Vietnamese PUBG community at a moment when the country's esports scene had just reached a landmark: its first-ever esports medal at the Asian Games. That was a signal that Vietnam is now viewed as a genuine counterpart on the Asian competitive map, no longer a backwater. But that competitive landmark came with another gap. When the Himass and TanVuu incident erupted, no body independent of Krafton could step in to adjudicate. The players' managing teams filed appeals, but structurally, those appeals are being reviewed by the very entity that issued the penalty. One more important detail of context. Based on what I gathered, the incident appears to be tied to a showmatch or international exhibition, not an official ranking event. This immediately raises a proportionality question: is a penalty designed for professional competition appropriate for an event of a lighter nature? Meanwhile, the community response reached a scale I have never seen in a Vietnamese esports event. 4.1 million signatures. Top streamers such as Do Mixi and PewPew spoke out. One player is said to have cried and deleted the game out of frustration. These are strong emotional signals, showing that community trust in the system is extremely low. What VTV3 did was not to defend the two players. This needs to be stated clearly, because the community tends to read these incidents in binary terms: who is right, who is wrong. The national broadcaster did not judge that. It raised a different, more systemic question: if there is a penalty, what specific rule was violated? How was the process carried out? This is a question any judicial system must be able to answer. In football, when a player is suspended, FIFA or the national federation must specify which clause of the disciplinary code was breached. In esports, the answer is usually just a short notice: a violation of tournament regulations, with no clause, no process, no public evidence. And this, I believe, is the core of the entire story. The origin of the conflict is not the players, nor the penalty itself. The origin lies in the fact that esports has no independent federation modelled on traditional sport. The publisher is simultaneously the rule-maker, the event organiser, and the penalty-issuer. This three-in-one structure inherently generates suspicion of unfairness, regardless of whether the specific penalty is right or wrong. When we talk about a governance model in which the publisher writes the rules, runs the event, and issues the punishment, we are talking about a structure that any mature industry must avoid. In finance, regulators are separated from commercial institutions. In healthcare, drug regulators are separated from manufacturers. In traditional sport, federations are separated from tournament organisers. Esports is not, and the price is incidents like this one, repeating over and over. What matters more than all of this: the parties involved, as far as I understand from late-night calls, do not oppose the existence of a disciplinary system. They oppose a system that operates without transparency. This distinction is crucial, because it completely changes the nature of the story. This is not the story of a community defending its favourite players. This is the story of a community demanding a credible process. There is a worrying gap between the level of emotion and the level of disclosed information. The community has largely concluded that the two players were wronged, while the truth of the specific violation remains undisclosed. This is the point where I want to pause, because it bears on how the story could end in two very different ways. First direction: Krafton publishes the specific rule and process. If the evidence shows the penalty was reasonable, the community will face a version of the truth different from popular belief. The wave of support could dissolve as quickly as it appeared. Second direction: Krafton stays silent. The information vacuum will be filled with assumptions, and assumptions almost always favour the worst interpretation for the publisher. I have followed many similar controversies over more than two decades in the industry. The pattern is clear: when an authority refuses to explain, it does not protect its reputation, it loses it. A fully explained penalty may spark debate for a few days. A silent penalty can cause damage for years. In this case, the most notable detail is the event context. If the incident truly happened at a showmatch or exhibition, the question is no longer who is right or wrong. The question becomes: how can a tournament-classification system allow a global ban to apply to an unofficial event? This is a system design problem, not a question of personal ethics. And this is where VTV3's standard hits the industry's weakest point. No independent federation. No unified tournament-classification mechanism. No independent sports tribunal with authority to hear appeals. The publisher is the rule-maker, the organiser, and the judge, all at once. No conspiracy is needed to see the problem. Just a public process. Now I will say what many in the community may not want to hear, but I must say it, because that is how I work. The wave of support for Himass and TanVuu, however strong, rests on a very thin evidentiary foundation. The figure of 4.1 million signatures is a notable signal, but signatures are not legal evidence. They measure the popularity of an opinion, not the truth. In sport, sometimes the crowd that is most certain is the crowd that is most wrong. I am not saying Krafton is right. I do not have enough information to conclude that, and VTV3 itself does not conclude that. What I am saying is: the community concluded before there was data. This is a form of emotional bubble, and every bubble risks bursting. If Krafton tomorrow publishes evidence showing the two players did in fact violate a serious rule, then those four million signatures become a collective stain, and those who signed will have to live with the feeling of having been led by crowd emotion. But here is the more important counterpoint: even if the community is concluding too early, that does not excuse Krafton's silence. Both things can be true at once. The community can be led by emotion, and Krafton can still be concealing what should be disclosed. The truth does not sit neatly on one side. There is another perspective that I consider the most important, and it is rarely mentioned. This controversy reflects a structural problem in Vietnamese esports, not merely a Krafton problem. In recent years, Vietnam's international competitive standing has risen sharply, from players being recruited abroad to that first Asian Games medal. But the industry's governance infrastructure, including associations, dispute-resolution mechanisms, and professional esports management training, has not grown at that pace. This is the gap between achievement and institution, characteristic of emerging esports regions. In other words, even if Himass and TanVuu win their appeal, the system has not been fixed. An individual wins, the structure remains unchanged. When a similar incident happens to another player six months from now, everything will start over: a vague notice, a wave of outrage, a broadcaster stepping in, and not a single named rule published. I have spent many sleepless nights over incidents like this, and what I have learned is: an incident only becomes a turning point when it changes an institution, not when it changes the fate of an individual. A reversed penalty is a story. A published process is a reform. Only the second is worth writing about. So what happens next? I do not have a 2-0 prophecy like the night of 27 June 2026, when I called the result of the South Korea versus Germany match in Kazan. This time I will not predict the appeal outcome, because that outcome rests with an entity that has no obligation to explain itself to the public. But there is one thing I can predict with high confidence: if the managing teams of Himass and TanVuu cannot force Krafton to disclose the specific rule and process, this incident will produce no reform. It will simply be another emotional storm, fading away and leaving behind a community more tired, more cynical, and waiting for the next incident. And this is what I want to say: do not ask who is right, who is wrong. Ask a different question. Who writes the rules? Who runs the event? Who issues the penalties? And if the answer to all three is the same name, then no matter how this case turns out, the system had already failed before the incident began. The stands are empty, but the late-night call of the esports addicts has never gone quiet. And a national broadcaster just heard it.