GoKawiilBrendan Greene and his studio PlayerUnknown Productions just announced a downsizing effort. This is the developer originally behind the megahit battle royale PUBG. The company is laying off an unspecified number of employees and cancelling further development of one title, the survival roguelike Prologue: Go Wayback.
An early access version of this title has been available on Steam and Epic Games Store since last year for $20. Greene says he's "investigating" ways for players to get a refund. This early access build will remain available and will be free from now on.
The developer says this is all a response to the expenses involved with developing its in-house terrain-generation engine Melba. The company will continue making this tech, though with a smaller team. Melba was used to create maps for Prologue: Go Wayback. It's also supposed to be a core component of an upcoming massive multiplayer game called Artemis. We don't know where development stands on that one.
PUBG first came out all the way back in 2017 and Greene left parent company Krafton to form PlayerUnknown Productions back in 2021. The company recently dropped a tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World that uses Melba and lets people explore an "Earth-scale world generated in real-time."