Modding was one of the bigger requests that PlayerUnknown Productions founder Brendan Greene received from the community. So the studio—best known for creating PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the game that defined the battle royale genre—decided to test what modding could become by turning inward. Greene and his team held a two-day event that sent 10 developer teams into creative competition, each armed with the studio's own technology and tasked with building experimental modifications.
The developers split into 10 projects, ranging from a single dev to a full team of five. The team treated the jam like conventional game development, with one project initially named 'What Happens In The Darkest Days In The Dark?' The atmosphere inside the studio reflected something Greene values deeply. Teams flitted back and forth between desks, observing each other's work, offering criticism and advice, and occasionally emerging with new inspiration for their own projects.
This is not merely an exercise in team-building. Greene has stated a clear vision for what modding should mean at his studio. The modjam was designed to conduct experiments and test how feasible modding could become and what the studio could do with it. More fundamentally, Preface is open, with the studio allowing people to mod it and access the code without encryption because Greene believes that reflects what the early internet was about.
The modding philosophy is central to PlayerUnknown Productions' larger ambition. Prologue: Go Wayback! is scheduled to enter early access on 20 November 2025 as a punishing open-world survival roguelike emphasising exploration. Beyond that lies a more expansive goal. Preface: Undiscovered World and Prologue are standalone experiences serving as testing grounds for the studio's in-house technology that will eventually power Artemis.
The community has shown impressive creativity with Preface, including a Planet Radius Mod and a Speed Mod that modified character movement speed. Greene has open-sourced some tools as well. The GlobeUI Tool code was released under an MIT license, encouraging exploration and adaptation.
Greene has stated his desire to build games with the community, not for the community. This approach stands against industry consolidation. The modjam reflects the kind of organic, freewheeling internet that has been largely obliterated by corporate consolidation. Whether that vision proves sustainable as the studio scales remains an open question, but the internal modjam suggests Greene is testing it seriously.