Brandon ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene has announced that his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, will downsize due to hitting a fiscal wall. While the studio’s ridiculously ambitious Melba engine will continue its development with a smaller crew, the team behind its survival game. Prologue: Go Wayback, hasn’t been as fortunate.
“Unfortunately I have reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form,” PlayerUnknown shares on X. “As a result, I have made the hard decision to restructure the studio.” As noted, the Melba team will be downsized, and while the fate of Go Wayback’s devs hasn’t been confirmed, it’s looking anything but good.
As PlayerUnknown explains, PlayerUnknown Productions originally spun up the engine and Prologue: Go Wayback when it became independent in 2021. In its final form, Melba is expected to be capable of generating planet-sized worlds at scale, with machine learning systems doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Go Wayback can be considered a first glimpse at what the studio’s tech can do, incorporating some impressive procedural generation into its gameplay loop.
Everything PlayerUnknown Productions does underpins its grand vision: Project Artemis. This will, effectively, be a library of user-generated worlds, at scale, that all sit within the same universe. Our ex-Deputy News Ed Jamie Hore did a cracking interview with PlayerUnknown last year, so check it out for more on what that entails.
Unfortunately, this latest decision indicates that the studio’s perhaps been overly ambitious, though I’d posit Go Wayback had run its race. Don’t get me wrong, it had some solid systems, but it overall felt more like a proof of concept than a proper game. It currently sits with a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, which pretty much summarises my feelings towards it. It is set to become free-to-play in an upcoming update, while the studio’s looking into ways to refund Steam and Epic Games Store players. “We will have more details on this in the near future,” PlayerUnknown says.
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