PUBG creator Brendan Greene – AKA PlayerUnknown – has announced that development is being "halted" on his early-access survival game, Prologue: Go Wayback, amid restructuring at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions.
Prologue: Go Wayback was released into early access last November on Steam. Greene once threw out the phrase "realistic Minecraft" as one way to describe it – players explore procedurally generated landscapes with no guides or markers to guide them, not to mention elements like hunger, thirst, and harsh temperatures to battle against as they make their way to their goal, the Weather Tower. As per its Steam page, it's "the first of three games that lay the foundation for our studio's ultimate vision: Project Artemis. A platform for massive, living multiplayer sandboxes where millions of players can shape their own worlds and emergent stories."
However, Greene doesn't have good news to share today. He posts a statement on Twitter, calling the decision to restructure his studio a "hard" one, but explaining that he has "reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form."
He states: "Our goal has been to develop technology that can break the boundaries of scale, which currently limit how large virtual worlds can be. To achieve this, we built a research team to develop our Melba technology and a team to develop our first practical application of our terrain generation technology: Prologue: Go Wayback!"
However, due to those funding limits, things are changing. "I have made the hard decision to restructure the studio," Greene writes. "We will continue developing our Melba technology with a smaller team, while halting further development of Go Wayback.
"Our immediate priority is to support our affected employees to the best of our abilities during this difficult transition."
An update from our studio. pic.twitter.com/3E8Ke60mciJune 3, 2026
As for the future of the studio's early-access survival game, Greene says: "We plan to make Go Wayback! available for free for all future players with an upcoming update. We are also investigating offering players who have purchased the game on Steam and Epic Games Store a way to receive a refund. We will have more details on this in the near future."
Although it certainly doesn't sound good, a separate statement shared on Prologue: Go Wayback's Steam page suggests that this might not be the end of the game. "While we hope the studio can return to Go Wayback at a future point in time, right now it means we will be unable to complete our Early Access plans for the game," it says. "We are currently working on an update that we plan to release soon, which will add new items as well as paths and trails to the game for enhanced exploration." It's in this same update that the devs plan to take the game out of early access and make it free.
In Greene's statement, the dev concludes by thanking fans for their support for the studio so far. Prologue: Go Wayback has reached Mostly Positive reviews on Steam, with 70% of people giving it the thumbs up, and GamesRadar+'s very own managing editor for news, Ali Jones, previously called it "deeply compelling" in his preview, even if he felt it was a "punishing experience." That's not too surprising when creative director Scott Davidson told us it's "supposed to be as hard a survival game as you can make," though.
Check out our list of new games for 2026 and beyond to see what titles are on the horizon.
