PlayerUnknown departs PUBG company to found new studio
The grass is always Greener.
Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene has left PUBG parent company Krafton to set up a new indie studio, PlayerUnknown Productions.
It has been a couple of years since Greene was involved in development of PUBG. In 2019, he launched PUBG Special Projects, a new Amsterdam-based division which had been working on a fresh project codenamed Prologue.
Greene's new company is also based in Amsterdam and looks like it may continue working on Prologue, with Krafton investing in the new company with a minority stake.
"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 today 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."
A website for the studio includes the previous trailer for Prologue, suggesting development on the project may continue. The team is also said to be exploring systems to enable large-scale open-world games.
Krafton recently renamed PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to PUBG: Battlegrounds, diminishing the now-departed creator's visibility in its name. At the time, Krafton said the move was to streamline the titles of various PUBG-universe games in development.
As well as PUBG (which continues to do very well, thank you very much), Krafton has several other projects in the works. There's the upcoming futuristic mobile sequel PUBG: New State, the Western-themed Project Cowboy, and Dead Space creator Glen Schofield's The Callisto Protocol, which will apparently be tied into PUBG lore too somehow.