PUBG creator Brendan Greene forms independent production studio

Brendan Greene, creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, has established an independent studio in Amsterdam called PlayerUnknown Productions. The news follows almost a month of speculation about Greene’s next step after he removed his own “PlayerUnknown”-branded social presence. 

“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,” Green said in a statement. 

Despite PlayerUnknown Productions’ status as an independent company, Krafton will retain a minority stake in the business.

“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.”

For now, Greene is hiring multiple positions, including art design, engineering, and research, and the studio is pursuing “the systems needed to enable massive scale within open-world games.” So far, Greene’s has one title listed as in production: Prologue. 

It’s not a new title, though, nor is PlayerUnknown’s Productions a completely new venture. Greene started the studio in 2019 after saying “he was done” with battle royale, but not with the franchise he helped create. Greene left PUBG to Krafton’s Taeseok Jang and started exploring ways to create new experiences under the PUBG Special Projects division.

“Online experiences and spaces can connect us in ways I only dreamed of when I first sat in front of a computer some 30 years ago,” Greene said at the time. “And it is those dreams of connecting others that is driving our work at PUBG Special Projects.”

While Greene’s own future projects remain unclear, there’s no doubt he’s left PUBG Corp. and Krafton in general with solid prospects. 

In 2020, PUBG Corp. entrusted Sledgehammer Games founder Glen Schofield with leading Striking Distance, a studio built around diversity, inclusion, and healthy work-life balance, and producing its first new title in the PUBG universe. Adi Shankar, creator of the Castlevania Neftlix series, is also developing an animated show based on PUBG.

Meanwhile, after a disappointing–and overvalued–IPO in July, Krafton is exploring multiple media avenues aside from PUBG, including acquiring new studios and branching into both telecommunications and healthcare.