PUBG creator Brendan Greene is pivoting to the metaverse and blockchain tech, with a new NFT-clad game that he says will be "made for everyone", not money. This is part of a long-running plan that started in 2019 when he left PUBG's development to start PlayerUnkown Productions in Amsterdam.
It's developing Artemis, a virtual metaverse that will feature an AI population, sort of like a giant Earth-sized Roblox world inhabited by NPCs where you can trade NFTs and earn real money.
"I'm just going to do what I'm going to do," Greene said (thanks, Eurogamer). "[Artemis is] this thing that we want to create, and it's going to give people a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure, and a lot of meaningful things to do. But it doesn't matter if it's called the metaverse. I don't care what people want to call it.
"We're building a digital place," Greene continued. "That has to have an economy, and it has to have systems at work. And I do believe you should be able to extract value from a digital place; it has to be like the internet, where you can do stuff that will earn you money. But it's not about, like, Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It's some kid called AwesomePickle selling cool skins because he understands what people want."
NFTs have been a hot topic in games for a while now. Ubisoft announced its own plans to get into the blockchain and NFT world, though they didn't sell well and received a lot of backlash. As such, Ubisoft pulled out and said that it was simply "in research mode".
Part of the reason for the backlash is how environmentally unfriendly NFTs are given that they are built on the back of cryptocurrency, an incredibly energy-intensive form of currency.
Similarly, metaverses have proven unpopular in the wider games space as proven by Mark Zuckerberg's own announcement which turned into a viral meme. It was mostly mocked for its visuals after he posted a digital selfie in front of a digital rendition of the Eiffel Tower.