Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, creator of popular battle royale game PUBG, revealed a mysterious teaser for a new game called Prologue at The Game Awards 2019. While often abbreviated to PUBG, the battle royale game’s full title, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, shares the name of its creator, making Greene a well-known figure in the gaming world.
Released in early access in March 2017, PUBG quickly gained popularity, becoming the first big battle royale game. The genre was then adopted by many others, including the then-relatively unknown Fortnite. In fact, PUBG felt such an ownership over the genre that it attempted to sue Fortnite after Fortnite: Battle Royale began to steal the spotlight. Much of Fortnite’s success over PUBG was likely due to PUBG’s lack of polish, which Fortnite creator Epic Games was able to deliver alongside new content on a regular basis. By May 2018, PUBG had lost 50% of its players relative to its January 2018 count.
At The Game Awards 2019, Greene revealed Prologue, a new game from PlayerUnknown Productions (an experimental studio within the PUBG Corporation), with a short teaser trailer. The trailer shows a first-person view of someone hiding in a stormy forest, who begins to panic as they begin to hear the sound of barking dogs. While viewers may at first think the trailer is teasing something set in the PUBG universe – even a prologue to PUBG, perhaps – a PUBG community manager revealed on Reddit that Prologue is “not a PUBG 2.” Back in April, Greene announced he was done with battle royale games, instead moving on to explore new ideas, and the community manager said Prologue is indeed an original, non-battle royale IP.
Greene announced his transition away from leading PUBG development shortly after PUBG’s mediocre PS4 release. PUBG’s history is marked with controversy. While the aforementioned legal battle with Epic Games was one of 2018’s most notorious industry events, the game also faced controversy for its loot box mechanics, its bannings in multiple countries, and its constantly buggy state. Like the PS4 version a year after it, the Xbox One version of PUBG was quite bad at launch, controlling poorly and with terrible performance. Many of PUBG’s issues have been fixed over the years, but these initial failings made an impact.
Despite all of this, PUBG has still seen lots of overall success. The game celebrated 50 million copies sold in mid-2018, making it the fifth-best-selling game ever. Greene knows he won’t be able to recreate that magic again in his next project, saying he expected to be “s*** on” for his next game, but he said making something new was more important to him. It’s not known when PUBG fans will next get a look at Prologue, but perhaps Greene will reveal more at some point closer to Microsoft and Sony’s next-gen console releases.
Prologue does not yet have a release date, but it will likely arrive after the next-gen consoles launch.
