Brenda Greene - The father of PUBG game: From unemployed, fluffy "sticking" to her parents to a millionaire

From someone who lives on unemployment benefits

In 2013, Greene was stranded in Brazil after marrying a woman and moving to the country and then divorced. Without a penny, he had to save money from web design and wedding photography to buy a plane ticket back to Ireland.

That means cutting down on food costs and making friends. So Greene played various games for fun.

Not long after, when he got bored of playing games, he started to discover game mods - a term commonly used with first-person shooters, RPGs or real-time strategy games.

The main job of game mods is to edit the original code to create a new version of an existing game. Game mods can be as simple as adding new items, weapons, characters or storylines or more complex gameplay styles.

Greene said he was a part-time web designer at the time and had enough basic knowledge to mod the game himself. His inspiration comes from the classic Japanese sci-fi movie "Battle Royale" in which high school students are abandoned on an island, given weapons and must fight to the death.

By 2014, Greene had finally saved enough money to return to Ireland, but he had trouble finding work near his hometown of Kildare. He even had to move in with his parents and live off unemployment benefits. He receives 180 Euros a week (equivalent to 202 USD at current rates) from the government and uses this money to maintain his online server.

Greene's parents expressed concern about his focus on free game modding and wondered if he could make money from this hobby. Greene replied, "Maybe one day I'll make my own game, but not now." At that time, his product only attracted the attention of a small online community of gamers.

In the eyes of the working people living around, he is just a parasite living on government subsidies, wasting all his time creating useless free games.

"They tell me all the time, get a decent job, or no one will take me in. But I just ignore them." Greene recounted.

If Greene hadn't ignored the gossip around him that day, he might never have become the "father" of a globally famous game like now.

To the "father" of the billion-dollar game PUBG hit

Fortunately, Greene then caught the eye of a game developer at Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Game Company). At the end of 2014, after 6 months living with her parents and receiving unemployment benefits, Greene received an invitation to cooperate from developer Sony. The company asked him to work as a consultant for a game called H1Z1 so that they would license his "battle royale" concept for use in the game.

That led to a two-year consulting contract with Sony. Although he did not disclose his salary, Greene said it was enough for him to have a better life and not have to rely on government subsidies.

In 2016, Korean game company Bluehole (now Krafton Game Union) contacted Greene about developing its own battle royale title (later PUBG). More than half a year since its launch, PUBG has sold 13 million copies and rocked the computer game market and surpassed the "big man" Dota 2 in terms of players. After about 6 months, the game had 3 million concurrent players online - triple the number expected by Bluehole. The company's engineers had to reconfigure the server to serve the needs of more players.

Greene is currently the Director of Special Projects at PUBG Corporation and the game has sold over 50 million copies while the mobile version has 200 million downloads.

If you don't know, PUBG can be likened to the video game version of the famous movie "The Hunger Games", where 100 players fight each other until only one is left alive. omission.

After the resounding success of PUBG, Bluehole also quickly rose like a kite, with its value four years ago reaching $4.6 billion - up 5 times in just a short span of 3 months. . The company's founder, Mr. Chang Byung-gyu, also almost became a billionaire, when he held 20% of the company's shares.

Mr. Chang said Bluehole is also in talks with other big players in the gaming industry to bring PUBG to more players. Microsoft released PUBG on Xbox, Sony released a PUBG version for PlayStation.

At that time, it was extremely rare for an unknown game to suddenly "explode" and leave a big resonance, because the video game industry at that time had almost become its own playground. of the big names. The most recent game that suddenly created a buzz like the current PUBG is Minecraft, which is also a story from 2009 - more than ten years ago.

Of course, PUBG's temporary popularity will not guarantee that this game will continue to be successful in the future. The game industry has seen many cases where a game is forgotten as quickly as it was once famous. Moreover, Bluehole has no experience in managing a big game at PUBG's level, and since then there have been many problems that the company has not been able to completely solve. The most typical is probably the rampant hacking and cheating problem in this game at the present time.

Besides, another big problem is the appearance of games that follow, imitate, etc. It is clear that the survival game segment is a lucrative piece of cake that game developers hard to ignore. Epic Games' Fortnite is another game that is intending to compete directly with PUBG, or the big Ubisoft is also intending to pursue this game genre in the future.

As for Greene personally, he is still temporarily putting aside competition issues to focus on perfecting PUBG by the end of this year, so that he can release the official game version for fans. It seems that Greene will remain with Bluehole for a long time to come, and Bluehole founder Chang Byung-gyu also offered to offer Greene shares of the company to secure the relationship between the two. beside.

"When talking about Greene, I would call him an overnight millionaire," added Mr. Chang Byung-gyu.

Thus, just a few years after having to live on unemployment benefits, Greene had a completely different life with a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. He now lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, cycles to work every morning and travels frequently to promote his game.

Greene works from 9am to 5pm most days. The "father" of PUBG shared: "The success of the game helps me to have a comfortable life. I can provide for my family and my 13-year-old daughter adequately."

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