PUGB creator Brendan Greene has announced a studio restructure at PlayerUnknown Productions, admitting “I have reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form.”
In a statement posted to X/Twitter, Greene’s studio PlayerUnknown Productions said it had been a “hard decision to restructure the studio,” but committed to continuing development of its Melba tech.
“When PlayerUnknown Productions became an independent studio in 2021, 23 embarked on a journey to achieve an ambitious vision for the future,” the statement read.
“Our goal has been to develop technology that can break the boundaries of scale, which currently limit how large virtual worlds can be. To achieve this, we built a research team to develop our Melba technology and a team to develop our first practical application of our terrain generation technology: Prologue: Go Wayback!”
It continued: “Unfortunately, I have reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form. As a result, I have made the hard decision to restructure the studio. We will continue developing our Melba technology with a smaller team, while halting further development of Go Wayback.
“Our immediate priority is to support our affected employees to the best of our abilities during this difficult transition.”
As part of the announcement, the team also revealed that the studio’s Prologue: Go Wayback! game – the single-player open-world emergent survival roguelike where “every journey is unique” – will lose its $20/£17 pricetag and become free “for all future players with an upcoming update.”
As a consequence of that decision, PlayerUnknown Productions is now “investigating offering players who have purchased the game on Steam and Epic Games Store a way to receive a refund.”
Brendan Greene, best known as the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, founded his new independent studio back in 2021. PlayerUnknown Productions and is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
