https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-brendan-greene-im-done-with-battle-royale
As the article notes, he is moving on to PUBG Special Projects and basing out of Amsterdam to be closer to his family. This blog has bunches of stuff regarding PUBG in general because PUBG Corp used to be known as Bluehole Ginno (the subsidiary studio that used to make the game that I played a lot of before the entire franchise was shuttered in all regions last year; Devilian). There are so many untagged entries here that I haven’t gone back to and revised (and Bloggers search is useless since it returns only 7 results) but the jist is that Bluehole Ginno’s sole property was a Korean MMO take on the Diablo franchise, and that PUBG itself was not something they planned to be as wildly successful as it ended up being.
The company even took a chance on hiring a non-Korean with literally zero game industry experience except as a known modder for DayZ, ARMA and H1Z1. And as the article notes, the last two years was a wild ride for Greene and the team at PUBG Corp. He was even asked point blank about the high expectations of following this up with something equally or even more successful. While it’s easy for someone to make it seem like the success was not by accident after the fact, Greene knows very well he happened to be in the right place at the right time with PUBG and he might as well take advantage of this with PUBG Special Projects.
IMHO, Bluehole made a strategic mistake renaming Bluehole Ginno to PUBG Corp. Again, the company was tripping all over themselves back in 2017 trying to figure out how to manage this unexpected success with PUBG in terms of first proposing to merge parent Bluehole with Bluehole Ginno (formerly Ginno Games), then suddenly withdrawing that merger. The company then convened an extraordinary shareholders meeting (the company is privately held) to rename the company and to restructure it to handle only PUBG. This new structure (plus name) shoehorns them into PUBG where you live and die by the success of that franchise.
The company made noise about Fortnite potentially copying parts of PUBG and later filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in South Korea against Epic Games, only to drop that suit shortly after. Let’s just say a “little birdie” reminded them of their Unreal Engine contract with Epic Games (what I brought up in that blog posting) and how their pushing such a lawsuit could potentially backfire in having all of their licenses revoked should Epic have decided to use the nuclear option (a former colleague of mind was part of a fund that were early private investors in Bluehole and he relayed this stupidity to folks he still knew in the company). PUBG went on this tear but has now become a victim of its own unintended success by having others imitate it (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery) and taking market and mindshare from it. Unfortunately, the battle royale mode is being overdone and there will be a point where something else will come along, and steal the limelight.
Special Projects is of course an attempt to try to find that next big thing. For Greene, he went from being someone nearly on welfare in Ireland to raking in a ton of money (given Bluehole’s Alliance structure where subsidiaries that do well rake in extra bonuses before that success is shared with the rest of the companies subsidiaries). PUBG Corp celebrated in that success with new digs in Seoul as well as office expansions worldwide. In short, the company really hasn’t figured out how to prioritize managing that success (by not prioritizing addressing issues with PUBG first; which later resulted in the company offering a mea culpa for the lack of communication and putting out this PR stunt called “Fix PUBG”) and engaging in some corporate hubris first. To put it more bluntly, special projects is a stab by Bluehole/Krafton at hoping for another wild and unexpected success; lightning rarely strikes twice by accident though. Not even designers of prior successful titles end up having as much success in other games they work on (witness all of the Blizzard North veterans that worked directly on Diablo and Diablo II).
And that is the irony of Greene stating he is “done with battle royale” because he still works for the subsidiary that erroneously (IMHO) decided to rename itself after the name of the game (PUBG being the definition of a battle royale game). But just as many of these Korean studios rename themselves when the wind direction blows a different way, when PUBG eventually turns into this has been, Krafton will simply convene another extraordinary shareholders meeting to rename PUBG Corp to something else and have them work on other projects. In the meantime, the game will be the definition of a cash cow (to be milked until it can’t be milked any longer) while the rest of the KRAFTON Game Union will be hoping to find the next secret sauce that players will jump on (neither A:IR nor MISTOVER will be it though).
