The Creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Wants to Build a True Metaverse

ign.com:

In 2017, Brendan Greene (aka “PlayerUnknown”) pioneered the Battle Royale genre of games with the early access release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The game has since gone on to become a massive hit, spawning countless more games like it, including some of the most successful games of all time.

Next year, 2025, Greene wants to pioneer something new. He wants to make a metaverse. No, not the one you’re thinking of. Greene doesn’t think those count as actual metaverses.

“I hesitate to talk about this, because it's just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don't think anyone else is,” he tells IGN. “I think everyone's building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we're lucky, but it's not the metaverse. See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that's what I'm trying to do with Artemis.”

Artemis, aka Greene’s metaverse, is actually the third of three games he’s currently cooking up at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. The first two are testing grounds for the technology Greene eventually wants to use to build his metaverse. They’ll each be games in their own right, but their real purpose is to work out the kinks in Greene’s most ambitious ideas before they hit primetime in Artemis.

The first game, Prologue, is already being tested by players in Greene’s Discord (in an early format Greene refers to as “Preface”) and is planned for a wider release in 2025. It’s a fairly basic survival game, Greene says, with a simple loop of trying to reach an objective while dealing with typical survival mechanics. There’s weather, hunger, crafting, discoverable loot, and other such elements to deal with, but the real meat of Prologue is its terrain generation tech. That’s what Prologue is really about: testing high-tech terrain generation at a small scale, before implementing it more