PUBG's Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene to head up new 'experimental' division in Amsterdam

[Cal Jeffrey]

What just happened? Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene will no longer be working on Battlegrounds. He is moving from Seoul South Korea to Amsterdam to open a new division of PUBG Corp called PUBG Special Projects.

In a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Greene said he would remain connected to the game that bears his nickname. He will assume the role of “consulting creative director,” while former Art Director Taeseok Jang will take the lead of the PUBG team.

“The past five years of my life has been all about battle royale. From the early days working on a mod to getting the chance to create my vision for a battle royale title, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It's been an incredible journey, and our game has reached heights I never thought possible. Seeing the game grow into what it is today has been a dream come true, and I can't thank our fans and the incredible team at PUBG Corporation enough.”

PUBG Special Projects will be a research and development division that will mostly be in charge of experimenting with and developing new tools and gameplay. However, Greene sees it as more than just an R&D division.

And now for something completely different... pic.twitter.com/f9qpkHMHu8

— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) March 13, 2019

“For me, it is more than that,” he said. “Together with a team of game developers and researchers, we will explore new possibilities of interaction and connection within the game space.”

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds started as a collection of mods for ARMA 2 and ARMA 3 back in 2013. Greene worked on the mods in his spare time while he was working as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer. He consulted for Sony Online on the game H1Z1. Bluehole hired Greene in 2016 to work on a stand-alone battle royale game, and the rest is history.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds blasted to the top of the Steam charts and has since added a new word, PUBG (pub-gee) to the English lexicon. PUBG spawned a whole new genre of video game (Battle Royale), which many other companies have adopted including the wildly successful Fortnite (Epic) and Apex Legends (Respawn).

The player who was once unknown seems excited about his move and his new position. We wish him well and look forward to seeing what Greene and his new team creates.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/79174-pubg-director-brendan-greene-head-up-new-experimental.html

 

[texasrattler]

Isnt that what Pubg was, a experiment that has actually failed? Sure it made money, most things do with enough hype n paying high profile streamers will usually do the job.

Pubg imo is a great concept that has failed many times over due to the incompentance of the dev n Greene, neither of which knew how to make a fps shooter. They didnt listen when they should have n when they did, if they did, it was way to late. Damage was done, game failed.

Lets not put Apex Legends in the same category as Pubg, one knows what they are doing n how to do it, the other doesnt.
Fortnite only exists as it stole the idea from Pubg to begin with. People seem to forget Fortnite had been out for years n did nothing. Wasnt until a BR mode was out and again, streamers hyped it up. Course the idea was Pubgs which Epic took n put in their own game.

As of now Apex is the only real BR game that is working, everything is either broken or simply crap.

 

[Kezhen Gao]

Perhaps he should spend more time focusing on code optimization. PUBG was a disaster plagued with various performance issues that took forever to get some of them resolved. Initial release on Xbox was a complete joke.

 

[stoolroyale]

Isnt that what Pubg was, a experiment that has actually failed?

considering all of pubg's success metrics this is a tough position to take, that said I agree with you for the most part. the rapid rise and fall of the game speaks to the wasted opportunity of it becoming a permanent mainstay in The West. many well documented reasons why; failure to quickly quarantine the cheating region, failure to address queue design issues, optimisation issues, pr disasters and disdain for the player base, just to name a very few obvious ones. All of the blame lies at brendan greene's feet.

so greene leaving may well be the best thing to happen to the game, but it's probably too little too late, and who knows if the new guy has his head screwed on any better, we can only hope!

 

[yazooo]

Why is it article comments are typically skewed negative, almost irrationally so?

To take a game from nothing to the scale which it achieved, to spark a whole new fad/genre (whether you like it or not) and to generate the kind of revenue they have are surely measures of some sort of success. They might not be your measure of success, but to be honest, if you didn't like it, why play the game? If you didn't play the game, they why comment - I honestly just don't understand the point.

I just wish people would contribute more instead of continually detracting.

Despite the several complaints you raise about the game, they clearly coudln't have been as bad as you are stating as people still continued to play, and the numbers while showing a rise and fall showed far more consistency than the vast majority of games.

Anyway, I for one hope to see more coming out of this new division.

 

[texasrattler]

Why is it article comments are typically skewed negative, almost irrationally so?

To take a game from nothing to the scale which it achieved, to spark a whole new fad/genre (whether you like it or not) and to generate the kind of revenue they have are surely measures of some sort of success. They might not be your measure of success, but to be honest, if you didn't like it, why play the game? If you didn't play the game, they why comment - I honestly just don't understand the point.

I just wish people would contribute more instead of continually detracting.

Despite the several complaints you raise about the game, they clearly coudln't have been as bad as you are stating as people still continued to play, and the numbers while showing a rise and fall showed far more consistency than the vast majority of games.

Anyway, I for one hope to see more coming out of this new division.

Majority of people left, what do you think that meant? Game is a utter mess n failure. Chinese rule it. No one wants to be around them. They either dont talk, cant or simply cheat.

No one said we didnt like the game, we bought into the concept but when you have a incompetent dev team n a *****ic guy, you get a unpolished game. Neither have a clue about making a fps shooter.
Pubg only ever achieved one thing, how to mess up a great concept.

No one wants to see anything from Bluehole ever again. They showed they dont have what it takes to make a shooter n have the wrong people at the helm.
Pubg died for most, let China have it. No one else wants it.

 

[MaXtor]

Pubg is still the #2 game on Steam beating out the free to play CSGO (#3) with on average 50% higher numbers and leaving the #1 spot to the free to play Dota 2 only by 10% or so. Yeah, what a failure... /sarcasm

 

[Capaill]

It was a failure in the sense that it never became what it could have been - a polished bug-free FPS. But it was a huge success in even becoming playable, somehow supporting the millions that insisted on playing it and defining a new and hugely profitable genre in gaming. It is to Battle Royale what Dune2 is to RTS or Doom is to FPS - not technically the first in each genre but certainly the ones that caught everyone's attention.

 

[MaXtor]

It was a failure in the sense that it never became what it could have been - a polished bug-free FPS. But it was a huge success in even becoming playable, somehow supporting the millions that insisted on playing it and defining a new and hugely profitable genre in gaming. It is to Battle Royale what Dune2 is to RTS or Doom is to FPS - not technically the first in each genre but certainly the ones that caught everyone's attention.

To expect a bug and issue free game in such a short period isn't realistic. Counter Strike Source for example came out in 2004 and has been receiving bug fixes for 14 years (last update/bug fix was in July 2018), and the game still has bugs.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

ARMA 3 is so ridiculously difficult to play. Simplifying it into PUBG was sheer brilliance.

It's amazing how games like Counter Strike and PUBG start with just mods...