Brendan 'PlayerUnkown' Greene, creator of PUBG, says his new game is a 15-year, metaverse-style project that could make use of the blockchain to power its economy.
Greene announced Prologue way back during The Game Awards in 2019, and you'd be forgiven if you're still confused about what it actually is. In short, Prologue is a tech demo that'll build a massive world for you to explore as you load into the game, and there'll be some sort of survival system to challenge you once you're in the world. Prologue, then, will be a proof of concept for a much larger project currently called Artemis.
"We want to make our engine easy to mod, and to make it open source so everyone can participate," Greene tells journalist Nathan Brown of the Hit Points newsletter. "That’s what it has to be, I think. It won’t be PlayerUnknown’s Metaverse, just like it isn’t Tim Berners-Lee’s Internet. It has to be owned by everyone."
Yes, Artemis is a metaverse game. It's been in the concept stages since before "metaverse" was a corporate buzzword, and Greene describes this as a 10 or 15-year project, so it may even outlast the fad. But it's building on similar design ideas that have led publishers to try incorporating blockchain technologies like NFTs into games.
A year of pushback on the blockchain from the gaming community hasn't broken Greene's interest in the technology, which he's expressed in older interviews with outlets like VentureBeat. In the new interview with Hit Points, Greene says "We’re building a digital place. That has to have an economy, and it has to have systems at work. And I do believe you should be able to extract value from a digital place; it has to be like the internet, where you can do stuff that will earn you money."
Blockchain could have a part in securing that economy, though Greene's own modding background informs how he looks at its implementation. It won't be in-game items representing big deals with brands like "Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It’s some kid called AwesomePickle selling cool skins because he understands what people want."
The interview paints Greene as seeing "merit in the function of the technology, if not its execution so far," but over the course of another decade or more of developing Artemis, the appropriate technology is apt to see big changes.
It's worth noting that Greene left South Korean game studio Krafton in 2021, taking PlayerUnknown Productions in Amsterdam independent - though PUBG itself remains with Krafton. Earlier this year, Krafton announced a partnership with Solana Labs to "support the design and marketing of blockchain-based games and services."
