PUBG creator’s new survival game is shutting down

The creator of PUBG suffered a brutal fall after the biggest success of his career; his survival game called Prologue: Go Wayback! is shutting down.

Brendan Greene, better known as the creator of the legendary battle royale called PUBG, has just announced that his survival project called Prologue: Go Wayback! is shutting down only six months after entering Early Access. The studio is stopping development completely and laying off part of its staff. His message was pretty direct; "I have reached the limits of how long I can fund this journey."

The main reason this game is shutting down is that almost nobody played it. Even though the project comes from the man who created the legendary PUBG, Prologue: Go Wayback! never managed to attract an audience the way PUBG did. According to the data, the game reached a peak of only 182 concurrent players on Steam, but quickly dropped into double-digit player counts afterward. For a survival game, that is practically a death sentence.

The most interesting part of this whole story is that Prologue was never the final goal. The game was actually supposed to be much more than just a game. Greene saw it as the first step toward a massive project called Project Artemis, which was supposed to enable huge procedural worlds with millions of players.
In other words, the game was a technology demonstration, and the technology itself was the real product.

It is not completely over, but it is for Prologue. Even though development is ending, the studio will not disappear entirely, because a smaller team will continue working on their Melba technology while Prologue receives its final update, exits Early Access, and becomes free for all players. The studio is even exploring the possibility of refunds for people who already bought the game.

This is one of those reminders that making the next hit after PUBG is actually much harder than making the first one.

Brendan Greene created one of the biggest phenomena in gaming history, almost as if he invented an entirely new genre (Battle Royale), but his new project failed to find an audience. Now it remains to be seen whether his technology will survive and one day lead to Project Artemis... Or whether Prologue will be remembered as a very expensive experiment.