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The Making Of PUBG, A Billion-Dollar Game
Posted
April 26, 2019
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April 26, 2019
10,642
278
9
2.70%
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Six years ago, Brendan Greene was 37, divorced and making $300 a month. He started playing video games to entertain himself without spending lots of money and got inspired.
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Today he is a creator of the massively popular “battle royale” genre and one of its top games, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which brought in an estimated $1 billion in revenue in 2018.
Underemployed and playing video games
Greene wasn’t in a great place in 2013. He was stuck in Brazil, where he’d moved in his early 30s with his wife, but their marriage ended in divorce. Scraping by on the money he made from photographing weddings and designing websites, Greene was trying to save enough to buy a plane ticket back home to Ireland.
That meant cutting back on expenses like eating out and socializing, so to entertain himself, Greene turned to video games.
“I was kind of stuck in my bedroom, basically working and playing games,” Greene tells CNBC Make It.
Greene, who says he played everything from Atari 2700 growing up to Delta Force: Black Hawk Down on PlayStation 2 but was never a serious gamer, soon discovered the world of online video game “mods” (as in “modifications”). With mods, fans create their own custom versions of a video game by tweaking the source code to alter gameplay. Game developers often encourage this type of engagement, even including suites of coding tools to help.
As a part-time web designer, Greene knew enough basic coding to experiment with his own “mod” games. He drew inspiration from existing “survivor”-style mods created by the online community as well as cult-classic Japanese sci-fi film “Battle Royale, ” in which high school students are dropped on an island, given weapons and then forced to fight to the death.
Greene even named his first mods after the movie, which helped establish him as a creator of the now huge “battle royale” genre. Greene describes the model as “a last-man-standing death-match,” where a group of players are dropped in a harsh environment, scramble to find weapons and battle each other to the end. (Epic Games’ Fortnite and Electronic Arts’ Apex Legends are also battle royale games.)
Greene loved that style of game, he tells CNBC Make It, “because it wasn’t linear, it was a world where you were set loose.”
Read more about PUBG here
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From playing video games while broke on welfare to creating billion-dollar game ‘PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ | CNBC Make It.
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