“I’ve been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff” – PUBG creator Brendan Greene distances himself from investor Krafton’s controversial ‘AI first’ mandate

Brendan Greene, the creator of PUBG, better known by his alias PlayerUnknown, has said he’s “heartened” to see see people rally against the use of generative AI when used to make games.

His comments came while responding to questions about whether his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, uses generative AI to power the world-generating technology it’s currently working on, which he one day hopes will generate Earth-sized planets that millions of people can play on.

“We don’t use LLMs [large language models] so I’m not super worried [about backlash],” Greene told me. “LLMS have their uses, but there were chatbots in the 60s and 70s that achieved a lot of similar things. So I’m not super worried there. The systems we’re building are to enable the artists to sculpt the worlds how they want. It’s like an orchestra: we can be either a violin player or we can be the conductor, where you know what everything does, and you just have some levers you can pull and it creates worlds pretty quickly.

“I’ve been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff,” he added. “It’s good to see that gamers go: ‘No – if it’s not built by artists, I don’t want to see it.’ So that’s been really great to see. So I’m not super worried, because I think we’re using it in the right way. I think we’re using it in a way that enables you to create worlds quicker, rather than taking away the jobs of artists.”

“It’s good to see that gamers go: ‘No – if it’s not built by artists, I don’t want to see it”

Greene’s remarks take on an additional edge given the links his studio has to Krafton, the South Korean company that controversially announced a company-wide ‘AI first’ mandate and entered a voluntary redundancy period recently where anyone who didn’t want to be a part of it could get out. PlayerUnknown Productions began life as a Krafton ‘special projects’ team that Greene set up after leaving the PUBG project in 2019.

“What we got up to in special projects was the first parts of what we’re doing now in this three-game plan,” he explained to me. “So that was the start of PlayerUnknown Productions and then after a few years, I asked to go out on my own and they supported me, and we birthed PlayerUnknown Productions.”

The key piece of information there is “they supported me” because Krafton remains an investor in PlayerUnknown Productions today. And why would Krafton invest in a studio and technology if it didn’t align with its future goals?

“As a fully independent studio, our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton’s chosen strategy,” Greene told me in a follow-up email after our call. “While Krafton remains a minority stakeholder in our studio, their internal operations are separate from ours since 2021.

“Project Artemis and our three-game plan are being developed independently by us and we have been working on our plans for some time now.

“While we are doing technological research into areas like machine learning to give our artists tools to generate worlds at greater scale using local GPU compute, our focus is on using technology to solve problems of scale for players to enjoy bigger and more emergent worlds.”

“Our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton’s chosen strategy”

The three-game plan he mentioned is already significantly under way. Game-one, Prologue: Go Wayback!, launches in early access on 20th November. It’s a survival and orienteering game about weathering the elements and finding your way through a forested wilderness, while not starving or freezing or otherwise dying in a variety of ways. But really it’s a demonstration of terrain-level world generation. In a minute or so the game builds a unique and detailed world for you to play in, and it does this every time you play.

The second game PlayerUnknown Productions is making will be a multiplayer shooter, which will be an exciting return to a genre Greene had colossal success in with PUBG. The game after that, game three, will introduce yet more layers and tools to the underpinning technology to get it to a point other people can use it in. And the idea is to release it for free as open source technology.