The gaming of the last 10 years has been primarily defined by the genre of ‘Battle Royale’. Games like H1Z1, PUBG, Apex Legends, Fortnite, or Call of Duty: Warzone have thrilled millions of players and earned billions of US dollars. And it all hinges on a man who was not in good shape back in 2013.
Which Irishman is it about? In 2013, the Irishman Brendan Greene was pretty much at his wit’s end. The man was 37, freshly divorced, and almost broke – he was also stuck in Brazil and didn’t have enough money to get back home.
Greene had moved to Brazil in his early 30s and wanted to build a life there with his wife. But everything went wrong, and the marriage failed. Greene made a living as a wedding photographer and also designed websites on the side. He earned about $300 a month, as a business site reported in 2019 (via cnbc).
His only goal at that time was to somehow get back to his homeland Ireland. But he lacked the money for the plane ticket. He was stuck in his bedroom, working a little and playing video games because he couldn’t afford anything else, even though he wasn’t really a big gamer.
A Japanese film inspired him to invent a mode for shooters
How did he get into gaming: Because he was designing websites on the side, Greene knew a bit about programming, and he had played a little as a child and teenager, sometimes Black Hawk Down on the PlayStation 2, but he wasn’t really a proper gamer.
Nevertheless, he now entered the world of “mods” in Brazil. These are modifications for video games made by the players themselves.
The Japanese film “Battle Royale” (2000) appealed to him: In the parody of the relentless Japanese school system, teenagers are abducted to an island, given a random weapon or item, a frying pan or a submachine gun, and made to fight each other to the death in the wilderness.
So Greene implemented exactly this idea for such a battle royale mode for existing video games, for Arma 2 and 3. He said he liked the idea because it was non-linear and played in a world where you would fail.
In December 2014, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was already such a big name that he held an AMA on reddit:
A video game developer from Sony discovers him
That was his first success: By 2014, Greene had earned enough money to fly back to Ireland, where he moved back in with his parents and lived off state benefits.
His parents weren’t too excited that their son in his late 30s was now saying he wanted to develop free gaming mods.
They asked him if he made any money with it – “Not yet, maybe sometime later,” was his answer.
But now an important person entered his life: John Smedley, a video game developer, was working for Sony Online Entertainment on H1Z1, a zombie survival game that wasn’t really progressing.
But Smedley, with a nose for trends, now offered Greene whether he wanted to join him as a consultant. From then on, Greene’s life developed like a dream.
3 years after Brazil, an Irishman gets his own game
Here’s how it went on: H1Z1 copied the idea from the Arma 3 mod and became a surprising hit with its variant “H1Z1: King of the Kill”.
Although the game was rough and never really matured, its game concept fascinated many players. At its peak on Steam, in July 2017, it reached 150,000 concurrent players.
H1Z1 also shaped a new generation of Twitch streamers: later stars like DrDisrespect and Ninja had their first successes here.
In 2016, the South Korean company Bluehole poached Greene and offered him the chance to develop his own game, which would even be named after Greene’s artist name: “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or short PUBG.
PUBG became the dominant PC game in 2017. The mania around PUBG peaked in January 2018 on Steam: At that time, the game had 3.2 million concurrent players. And even though the hype for PUBG waned in the West, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground still has up to 905,000 players on Steam today, especially in Asia.
The avalanche ‘Battle Royale’ rolled in relentlessly from 2017
This is how his idea took over the genre: By 2017, the avalanche ‘Battle Royale’ had become so large thanks to PUBG that Greene no longer needed it to keep rolling.
PUBG had been developed with the Unreal Engine for the PC, so the engine developer Epic Games had always kept an eye on the game.
When their zombie survival game, planned as a summer hit, Fortnite, turned out to be a flop in late summer 2017, quickly running out of steam, Epic Games had the developers behind Unreal Tournament quickly set up a new version of Fortnite that strongly resembled PUBG.
With Fortnite Battle Royale, a megaseller was born, conquering Twitch, PC, and the PS4 and Xbox One consoles. Later, the game came to mobile.
The similarities between Fortnite and PUBG were so great, that Bluehole even filed a lawsuit, but couldn’t achieve anything.
After the megaseller Fortnite, ultimately also big companies like EA (Apex Legends) or Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty: Warzone) entered the business and were able to celebrate some successes. However, no game became as big as Fortnite did from late 2017 to mid-2019.
The success of Fortnite even culminated in a grand world championship as a live event, where millions of US dollars were at stake.
Why did Fortnite supplant the original PUBG in popularity? Fortnite had 4 big advantages:
- Fortnite had a creative element through the building mechanics, which, in combination with the functioning battle royale mechanics, was extremely well received
- Fortnite was released for consoles and was free to play.
- With its comic look, where everyone is shooting but no one really gets hurt, it was apparently more attractive for children and teenagers than the previous military shooters
- Epic Games, the company behind the game, was a sleeping giant, which now poured its enormous resources into Fortnite, expanding and developing the game at an insane pace. Bluehole, who were known for a moderately successful MMORPG before PUBG, could not keep up
The graph shows the global interest in popular battle royale shooters. Even if PUBG was much more relevant at its peak than Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Warzone later on, the original pales in comparison to the phenomenon Fortnite:
From welfare recipient to star developer
Here’s how Greene later perceived his success: In 2019, CNBC interviewed Greene and asked him how he felt now that just a few years after living off social welfare in Ireland, he was now such a star. He said:
I have traveled around the world two or three times just to meet fans and go to conventions [and] events. I love it.
While there are many rumors about him, that he is on a yacht sipping champagne, he actually works most of the time from 9 AM to 5 PM and leads a completely normal life. But the nice thing is that he can now provide for his family and daughter and no longer has to worry about many things:
I am amazed at how big a game mode I helped develop many years ago, from which an entire genre of games has evolved.
Whether Brendan Greene, 12 years after he changed gaming, will have another brilliant idea that will shape the gaming of the future is still open. But he will try: Creator of PUBG makes new game, confident that many will hate it – but it helps a huge MMO
