Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, the mind behind the PUBG phenomenon, is provoking the industry with a radically opposing vision of the metaverse’s future. While giants like Fortnite and Roblox heavily invest in their own centralized digital universes, Greene, in an exclusive interview, states that “everyone is doing it the wrong way.” His long-term project, codenamed Artemis, promises a bottom-up, open-source approach, locally generated on players’ devices, without relying on mega servers. The revelation occurs in January 2026, a time when the race for the metaverse is heating up globally, including in Brazil, where the gamer audience is one of the largest in the world. This discussion is crucial because it questions the very infrastructure and accessibility of the virtual worlds that promise to dominate the next decade.
Greene’s plan, therefore, unfolds in stages. His studio, PlayerUnknown Productions (PUP), uses the survival game Prologue and the tech demo Preface as test beds. In this way, the technology behind them generates Earth-scale maps directly on the user’s computer GPU, offline. This is the key difference: instead of a server-client model limiting the number of people, Greene seeks to create “the internet in 3D,” an open space where millions, perhaps billions, can coexist. For this reason, he explicitly distances himself from the business partnership model, such as the recent deal between Epic and Unity for Fortnite Creative.
The Tortoise’s Path versus the Hare
Despite skepticism from some, like mentions of comments from Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, about the current impossibility of the metaverse due to server limitations, Greene remains confident in his alternative path. He admits that Artemis is about a decade away from becoming a reality, a much longer timeline than his competitors’. However, this is a deliberate bet. Meanwhile, Prologue will remain in early access for approximately a year, refining its world generation. Support for the game will continue for a few more years after the 1.0 release, time that PUP will use to prepare its engine for the next project in the trilogy.
Thus, the philosophy behind Artemis is one of total openness. Greene does not want to build an engine to compete with Unreal or Unity, but rather an agnostic “open framework” where any creation, regardless of the graphics engine used, can connect. In this way, he rejects the idea that the metaverse will be built on commercial agreements between companies. For the creator of PUBG, the digital future should be a protocol, not a closed product. Therefore, while the hares run with centralized models, Greene’s tortoise bets on a distributed technological foundation that, if successful, could completely redesign the rules of the game.
