Brendan Greene, creator of online battle royale shooter PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), who left the game’s development team in 2019, has revealed plans to create a next-generation, gameplay-focused metaverse called “Artemis.” It is highly unlikely that tokens (NFTs) will emerge.
Greene told IGN on Jan. 4 that he’s “not even thinking about” including NFTs in projects he’s currently developing at his game studio, PlayerUnkown Productions.
“I’m not even thinking about (NFTs).”
The cryptocurrency industry has consistently advocated for NFTs as the best way to protect IP and in-game assets across various gaming ecosystems, but Greene doesn’t seem to buy into the hype.
“Our concern is to get the engine into a condition where we can build it. And like I said, we’ll test the idea in game 2, but I’m not really even thinking about it right now. “It takes more than just making fun games.”
NFTs may not appear in Greene’s metaverse, but he said blockchain technology could be incorporated somewhere.
“Blockchain is an interesting financial tool. As a layer within the digital world (…) there will be future iterations of blockchain or hashgraph or those technologies will be interesting,” Greene said.
“Ultimately, it is a digital ledger, and if you can use a digital ledger, you will find the best one and use it. But that’s the truth,” he added.
Greene said the metaverse had become a “dirty word,” dismissing the efforts of other metaverse creators who created a “(intellectual property) bubble” of low-level technology that failed to deliver on the hype.
“I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think there is anyone else.”
“I think we’re creating an IP bubble where, if we’re lucky, everyone will be able to talk to each other at some stage in the future,” Greene said. “But not the metaverse.”
Three Games in Greene’s Metaverse
Greene said the final phase of his metaverse project will be called Artemis. This is actually the third game out of three separate projects currently in development.
The first game, called “Prologue”, is a realistic survival game built on a world generation engine trained on NASA’s Earth data. The game is currently online for testing and is scheduled for release in 2025.
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The currently unnamed second game will focus more on a massively multiplayer world with “millions” of characters spread across a large world. Both projects will be integrated into the final phase of Artemis.
Greene says Artemis’ ultimate goal is to create a “3D Internet” where players can create, modify, and engage in multiplayer gameplay across different worlds.
“Metaverse is a 3D Internet. You should be able to create your own world and have it all work on the same protocol, such as HTTP. The world is a page and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.”
Greene added that Artemis’ gameplay will follow a similar structure to existing games such as Minecraft and Star Trek Holodeck. That means focusing on user-generated content and creativity.
Greene left PUBG’s active development team in March 2019 to focus on building new games and technology at PUBG Special Projects and his spinoff game studio, PlayerUnkown Productions.
Metaverse has been one of the hottest stories in cryptocurrency and the broader technology space between 2020 and 2022. During this time, several cryptocurrency projects received huge valuations on the promise of providing a functioning metaverse, but have since failed.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg invested more than $40 billion to rebrand the social media company and create a functional metaverse.
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