PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio created by the developer that gives PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds its name, announced three games today. One is a free tech demo that’s available now on Steam, another is a survival game that will enter early access next year, and the third is the project all of PlayerUnknown Productions’ work is building toward.
Brendan Greene is a video game developer who goes by the moniker of PlayerUnknown and is widely seen as the creator of the battle royale genre. This last-man-standing concept first gained traction through his mods for DayZ and Arma 3 and then became a mode in Sony Online Entertainment’s H1Z1. Battle royales hit the gaming zeitgeist harder than ever when PUBG launched in 2017, eventually inspiring copycats that became some of the best royale games like Fortnite and Apex Legends. Greene has been relatively quiet since moving off PUBG development in 2019 to create PlayerUnknown Productions. Now, we finally know what this Amsterdam-based studio is working on.
At the PC Gaming Show today, Greene unveiled three separate projects that PlayerUnknown is working on and teased more that are on the way. It all begins with Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo meant to show off the capabilities of the Melba game engine that will power all of PlayerUnknown Productions’ titles.
“In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU,” Greene says. “This digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback contributes to its future development.”
Those learnings from Preface: Undiscovered World will be brought forward to Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game that uses machine learning for its terrain generation and forces players to deal with unpredictable, emergent weather conditions as they journey toward a weather station to call for help. A Steam early access release for Prologue: Go Wayback! is set for the second quarter of 2025, although playtests will occur before then.
The true goal of Preface: Undiscovered World, Prologue: Go Wayback!, and one more game that Greene isn’t announcing at the moment is to lay the technical foundation for Project Artemis. Project Artemis is meant to be the ultimate project that PlayerUnknown Productions is building toward with all its titles. Greene admits that his “vision for Atremis is challenging,” as it will be a massive multiplayer sandbox game. Project Artemis does not have a release window, but we’ll at least hear from PlayerUnknown Productions a lot more often now.