What just happened? Few people are associated with a genre quite like Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene is with battle royale; the only possible comparison could be Sid Meier and turn-based strategy. The creator of PUBG is leaving Krafton Game Union to form his own studio, called PlayerUnknown Productions, with Krafton holding a minority stake in the new venture.
Greene, of course, is well-known for creating the phenomenally successful PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. The studio behind the game, PUBG Corporation, is a subsidiary of Krafton.
A fan of movies such as Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, Greene started his journey working on a DayZ mod, back when DayZ itself was an Arma 2 mod. The success led him to Daybreak Games, where he acted as a consultant on an official H1Z1 battle royale mode. He then went to Bluehole (later called Krafton), which set up the PUBG Corp. subsidiary to make PUBG, paving the way for Fortnite and other similar titles.
Over 70 million copies of PUBG had been sold on PC and console by 2020, while the mobile version has generated over $5.1 billion.
Greene’s new studio, located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is “exploring the systems needed to enable massive scale within open world games.”
“I’m so very grateful to everyone at PUBG and Krafton for taking a chance on me and for the opportunities they afforded me over the past four years,” Greene said in a statement. “Today, I’m excited to take the next step on my journey to create the kind of experience I’ve envisaged for years. Again, I’m thankful for everyone at Krafton for supporting my plans, and I’ll have more to reveal more about our project at a later date.”
Greene hasn’t been actively involved in the development of PUBG since 2019 when he moved from Seoul, South Korea, to Amsterdam to open a new division of PUBG Corp called PUBG Special Projects. It could be that his departure is why the title was recently renamed PUBG: Battlegrounds.