Brendan Greene, creator of PUBG and one of the key founders of the battle royale genre, has left Krafton to found a new studio called PlayerUnknown Productions.
PlayerUnknown Productions will be located in Amsterdam, and follows Greene’s previous work for PUBGCorp’s Special Projects team in the country. Speaking on the move through a press release, Greene stated:
“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. 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 about our project at a later date.”
Back in 2017, Greene told Gamesindustry.biz that he wanted to “explore some other things” away from the battle royale genre, adding “I’ve done battle royale, it’s time to try something else.”
Greene’s career with battle royales started with a mod for Arma 2‘s DayZ mod, called DayZ: Battle Royale. From there, Greene consulted on H1Z1 and eventually went on to create PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, better known as PUBG (Krafton has since officially renamed it PUBG: Battlegrounds). Following the huge success of PUBG in 2017, other titles – such as Warzone, Fortnite and Apex Legends – eventually followed in its wake.
Although Greene is leaving, Krafton will still hold a minority stake in PlayerUnknown Productions. A press release has shared that the new studio is “exploring the systems needed to enable massive scale within open world games.”
In other news, indie game Whatever will allow players to try and sail a cargo ship down the Suez Canal. By contending with the “extreme inertia” of a cargo ship, creator Napas Torteeka hopes players will “realise how amazing every cargo ship’s captain is”.
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