PUBG Creator Steps Back From Game With A New Focus

The creator of the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has announced that he is stepping away from day-to-day operations, and will instead be focused on "special projects" in a new office under the PUBG Corp banner. Lead designer Brendan Greene made the announcement in a letter on Twitter.

"While I'll remain as a consulting creative director on PUBG, development will be led by Taeseok Jang and the fantastic team I have had the honor of working with over the past three years," he said. "They have some great things planned for this year, and I can't wait to share more with you soon!

"Going forward, I'll be based in Amsterdam, rather than Seoul, and focused on building out an entirely new division to focus on research & game development."

Greene said the new position would focus on "exploring, experimenting, and creating new technologies, tools, pipelines, and gameplay." Those experiments could feed back into PUBG, or develop into an entirely new game or middleware. At this point it isn't clear what will come of this work, or even if it will be public as a consumer product at all.

PUBG is widely regarded as the first hit battle royale game, which inspired imitators like Fortnite and Apex Legends. The field is wide open now, even including new modes in well-established shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. PUBG has remained in development with an active userbase, though. The studio just announced a free-to-play Lite PC version, and its maps will be remastered.