PlayerUnknown Brendan Greene points to PUBG’s future after its smashing first year

In exactly one year since launching on Steam in Early Access, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has shipped more than 40 million copies. That’s an astounding mark, and no one is more surprised than PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene.

Greene recounted his journey from an Arma modder who was in love with a new “last man standing” mode of playing called Battle Royale, where one player survives in a match of a hundred, to PUBG’s king of the hill. He went through multiple attempts to bring that mode to the mainstream, and he finally succeeded working with the team at Bluehole (later known as PUBG Corp).

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.