- We enjoy punishing our players. We enjoy making it hard for them because that's what players want, I think.

Hi, I'm Brendan Greene or Player Unknown and I'm Creative Director on PUBG, a defining game within the Battle Royale genre. 

I wasn't a massive gamer so I had never really any frame of reference with other games, but I set out to make a game that I wanted to play. I had seen the work that Brian Hicks and Jordan Terr did with the Survivor Gamez, an event in the DAYZ mod, but I couldn't play it because I wasn't a content creator so I had seen what they had done, but thought okay, well I can improve this in various different ways and sat down and planned out the Battle Royale game mode that a lot of people know today so came to Korea to started working with Bluehole and they were really willing to support me 'cause they knew I wasn't a creative director.

They knew I had no real experience in the industry so going there, they were ready to help and those early days, like I had kind of the game mode designed, so to speak, you know? We had the idea for the loot system. We hade ideas for the blue zones and stuff from ARMA 3.

Yeah I just love the community of ARMA. I love that there is this culture of modding both within Bohemia as a company and the community that surrounds ARMA. I mean it's a great platform and just the belief of their CEO Marek and the thought of the company that you know, they give you this open platform for you to make your own games.

I tried to do squares in ARMA, but I couldn't because they were too hard to code so I did circles so that's why we have this ever-decreasing circular play zones because of my inability to code what was in the actual movie. But mainly, the circle was created because in the Battle Royale movie, they used these squares and having like zoned off squares in there led to some issues when it came to game design because what happens if the two last players are separated by a number of squares so they can't fight each other so I was thinking okay, how can we get around this and I thought okay a circle is one way. It keeps all the players in one area and it gets smaller within each other. Doing a circle was easier for me to code, number one, because I couldn't code squares. But also it solved a lot of the problems that I saw with the method, the Battle Royale movie do to eliminate players.

I don't know if Takeshi Kitano even knows about the game, you know? I would like to think he did, but I doubt it. I think he has far more important things he needs to be worrying about.

The win rate in Battle Royale is super low. You know, for PUBG, I think it's like 10% or something like that, the chance of you winning a match. It's really quite low and most games aim for I think 60% win rate or something. You want to make the player feel like they're winning. With us, no, you're gonna be losing most of the time but I think that's the challenge. People want to win and yes being slapped down and losing all that, it just makes you want to win even more.

So when we finally released, it was a little nerve-wracking because you know, we were entering into Early access and I remember watching those final closed beta tests and seeing some streamers like play the game and seeing them have fun and seeing then that there wasn't crashes, there weren't any game-breaking things happening and seeing people have that level of fun, I was quite confident going into release going okay, we would have a pretty good system and it's a credit, again, to the team, our infrastructure team setup a wonderful server infrastructure system to handle you know, the quite rapid adoption that we saw and it was crazy.

You know, that first month of, I think we've broken a million copies sold in 16 days. I mean it was a crazy first month. We said on our Discord, we said oh, we're gonna introduce flash bangs and immediately someone was like oh I can't wait to see someone driving, throw a flash bang at them and see them crash into the side of a building and kill themselves. You know, this kind of inventiveness of we add something to the game and immediately players are thinking of weird and wonderful ways to use it.

So I think it's just the space that a battle royale-type game gives is that there is this freedom to play the game and use the items however you can imagine. For me, the design that I did for Battle Royale was the plane flying over the blue zone and the danger red zone. You know, that's my design. That's what I wanted to play myself. You know, I'm sure we'll see it evolving in other games coming forward and I'm interested to see what you know, Call of Duty does and then see what the Black Ops way of doing Battle Royale is. I'm interested in trying to see if you know, Battlefield will do something to the game mode that I created. Who wouldn't like to see For Honor battle royale, right? I mean that kind of idea that like I've always thought it could expand across, you know, Medieval, myth and fantasy, you know, World War II, World War III. You know, the last man standing concept, you know, I think it's just flexible to everything.

You know, fans of games will hate me for suggesting that you know, we can put battle royale in everything. The one thing I really love hearing about is the social elements of the battle royale genre and especially like PUBG, like I get told, I laugh when I'm meeting fans that they often you know, they're playing with their college friends that they haven't seen in 10 years and now they play every Friday night together. So you know, I think just the nature of the game that it's not high-paced all the time and there is a nice flow to it leads to be a very social game because you do get to hang around and chat to people when there is downtime in the game.

The battle royale lobby, I mean I don't know what I was thinking when I was creating it, but it led to some of the most amazing and weird and wonderful experiences like with H1, there was angry pug who was shouting Taiwan Number One. He got to go to the Taiwanese game show and star in commercials in Taiwan going Taiwan Number One. So like I mean seeing what the lobby has done, I remember in ARMA 3 going into some lobbies and seeing everyone sitting around one player who was playing Russian church music for everyone. You know, like weird and wonderful. Like everyone's a snake. Even though it's probably the worst place on the internet, it can sometimes be the best place on the internet and I don't think I'd get rid of it for the world.

You know, this year's gonna be I think a lot more Battle Royales and I'm just interested to see, it's like the MOBA explosion we saw some years ago that you know, you're gonna see many, many games come out. You know, some will succeed, some won't. You know, I wish everyone well. It will truly be a battle royale of battle royales this year I think.