PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio created by the developer that gives PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds its name, announced three games today. One is a free tech demo that’s available now on Steam, another is a survival game that will enter early access next year, and the third is the project all of PlayerUnknown Productions’ work is building toward.
Brendan Greene is a video game developer who goes by the moniker of PlayerUnknown and is widely seen as the creator of the battle royale genre. This last-man-standing concept first gained traction through his mods for DayZ and Arma 3 and then became a mode in Sony Online Entertainment’s H1Z1. Battle royales hit the gaming zeitgeist harder than ever when PUBG launched in 2017, eventually inspiring copycats that became some of the best royale games like Fortnite and Apex Legends. Greene has been relatively quiet since moving off PUBG development in 2019 to create PlayerUnknown Productions. Now, we finally know what this Amsterdam-based studio is working on.
At the PC Gaming Show today, Greene unveiled three separate projects that PlayerUnknown is working on and teased more that are on the way. It all begins with Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo meant to show off the capabilities of the Melba game engine that will power all of PlayerUnknown Productions’ titles.
“In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU,” Greene says. “This digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback contributes to its future development.”
Those learnings from Preface: Undiscovered World will be brought forward to Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game that uses machine learning for its terrain generation and forces players to deal with unpredictable, emergent weather conditions as they journey toward a weather station to call for help. A Steam early access release for Prologue: Go Wayback! is set for the second quarter of 2025, although playtests will occur before then.
The true goal of Preface: Undiscovered World, Prologue: Go Wayback!, and one more game that Greene isn’t announcing at the moment is to lay the technical foundation for Project Artemis. Project Artemis is meant to be the ultimate project that PlayerUnknown Productions is building toward with all its titles. Greene admits that his “vision for Atremis is challenging,” as it will be a massive multiplayer sandbox game. Project Artemis does not have a release window, but we’ll at least hear from PlayerUnknown Productions a lot more often now.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.