PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Comeback… So Why Did They Do This?

Uh well talking about funding I want to talk about the second steam game. So Player Unknown Productions from the PUBG creator Brandon Green they released their first game. So that was also started on the same year as the the Finnish channel 37 2021 and they released their first game which is called prologue go way back. So b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b basically this is the uh the warm-up title from the studio and the studio is fully remote AAA worldbuilding studio uh headed by the great and powerful Kim Nordstrom actually as a CEO and they raised in 2021 $70 million from Craftton. 70 million. Yes, it's almost identical. Same founding date, same platform, much better funding. Arguably much better team, bigger team, more experienced team, more expensive team. The difference is also that this is also a fully remote team. So they released

this game which is interesting. It's a survival crafting game just like channel 37, but in this game you're not fighting against anybody. It's a single player and you are essentially surviving the environment. So this is like a normal day in Sweden or uh or another one. Like there's [laughter] there's anything is trying to kill you from trees to climate to bad food, bad meatballs and things.
I love it.
Trees. Yeah. You can die from a tree here in this game. So, it's that kind of like a survival game. You're just walking around, you're hungry, you're you're cold, you're this, you're that, and you die, and so you you trying to get out of the map.
Ooh, the compass play. We're looking at the video, and it's guys, you have compass play.
Exactly. It's like super hardcore. There's no map. There's no nothing. There's of course no weapons and and there's no that kind of enemies. It's just it gets dark and you die. It's in early access and it doesn't look very good. So the uh it peaked at 182 players. Uh there were 14 players at the

moment when I was looking
I'm sorry. Can you say that again, Mishka? Just to clarify, were you missing a digit?
Okay. No. No.
182.
What is that? Just the friends friends and family build.
So again, early access, but I have to say channel 37 is also early access. And we've talked multiple times that early access is the launch. I mean it took what Tarov 8 years to exit early access so it's quite polished and I don't want to be negative about this game. I just wanted to raise that this is an alternative reality especially if you put in a lot of funding and you release a game and I don't know I wanted to ask Chris like what do you think about the strategy of almost like releasing a prequel and kind of showing what your studio can do and then go in and try to raise funding because I assume they're raising funding because I saw them at Slush uh they were doing these big keynotes with Brandon. I kind of accidentally saw that they're in Middle East doing keynotes already at like these investor events. So the only reason a founder is, you know, in Middle

East and slush is that they're raising money. They're, you know, they're not promoting this game. So Chris, what do you think about the strategy? [laughter]
Well, do you are you sure they made 70 million?
It wasn't in Crunch Page, but uh there was a headline that says that Craftton reportedly put in $70 million, but this was 2021. 2021 was different world and also Brandon Green's metaverse pitch is strong and this is a guy coming from PUBG.
It's like like he's generated gazillion billion dollars.
And so this is our friend Kim Nordstrom who's in this company.
He's the CEO of this company. So be be gentle. Be gentle.
I love Kim. I hate to do this but like
why the fact that they use Player Unknown in their name for their new studio is a little bit
shady. [laughter] shady as [ __ ] right? For PUBG, right?

When he joined Craftton, like he was Player Unknown, like he was the modder and so he brought the mod and that was Player Unknown Battlegrounds.
Like he is Player Unknown.
PUBG is Player Unknown Battlegrounds. He's Player Unknown. So he he owns the PU out of PU PG.
Okay. So, I think raising $70 million and this is their first entree is a little bit frightening. On the positive side, I think Craftton is a publisher and therefore they will have more flexibility in terms of how they fund this stuff and this makes a little bit more sense than a venture capital investment, right? But so far like obviously this game is not performing well. The fidelity is really high. I don't think this is a cheap game to make.
But is it a proof of concept?
It's a good team. That's what I mean, Jen, is like this is a strategy to like after four years, this is a proof of concept. This is not what we're intend to build. That's why it's called prologue and we are building something much bigger. Open world, AAA, MMO, cryptocurrency, you name it. I I was

listening to the talk. This is a demo of what we will be building.
All right, let me speculate here. This is my speculation, please. Right. If he's out there trying to raise funds outside of Craftton, then it's very likely that Craftton has said, "Fuck no, we're not doing [laughter] giving you any more money, right?" Like, that's a bad place to be, particularly when you've had, according to you, 70 million invested already. So now they built this engine, they built the tech, they built their team. So they move on to the next project and hoping to god they find some other investor to do it. But if Crafters is not doing it, then they have a tough road ahead of them, I would say. Yeah, especially if if the investor has access to Steam DB. I wonder if Changhan Kim, the the CEO of Craft and is now like using chat GPT to figure out how to get out of this deal. [laughter]
Right. Right. Right.
I just don't know why you would pick this like single player. I know that survival crafting is a thing, Phil. Right. But

yes,
but single player.
Well, hold hold up hold up. Well, we don't we don't know where the the game itself is going. You got to remember that Rust and Ark have been mainstays on the Steam top 10, top 20 PSU charts forever. And so I was just wondering when the survival crafting thesis was going to take over. And I think we've just seen it. Mishka just showed two games that are finally starting to emerge. Remember there's another one. Do you guys remember Robboto Games which got 15 million from A16Z? They announced their game Storge, which is also more of an RPG style survival crafting game. And if you look at extraction shooters, there's definitely a lot of tie-in of how extraction shooters, you can see the same inventory systems, a lot of the same mechanics. You've seen Tarov, you've seen some of these games, too. So, like the the thesis of like doing survival crafting makes sense to me. I don't think this is the right way to approach that thesis. I don't understand what the interesting spin is. I But I I agree with you. I think this is this is a weird take on the genre, and I'm not quite sure how you would expect to scale

a single player game. I I don't see where the money is.
Well, that's why I think it's a pro a proof of concept because [clears throat] even though you have a an established founder, almost no one ever lands the plane on their first game. And so, are they saying, "Hey, let's get something out. Let's show let's try some mechanics. Let's get some early feedback." And maybe this, you know, we're looking at something that's way too early. Although, I would have kept it under Steam keys then and not put it into early access. Again, you can do regional regional locks on Steam. No one does. It's crazy to me.
But I think what what's happening is people don't understand the new Steam publishing. Like I keep running into veterans like these folks who don't understand that the world has changed. And even though we talk about it on the podcast all the time that early access is a launch, people don't understand you can still utilize. I mean, think about Deadlock. Remember what they did with you have to bring a friend, you have to have co-op keys. and that still kind of allowed for people to play the game but

kept it under wraps. So I think perhaps and again I'm speculating that they didn't they're not playing to the new Steam publishing that you need to do if if the hype my hypothesis of like proof of concept is anything to be you know talked about.
I'll speculate one thing. I think that that Kim Nordstrom has such an experience from mobile and he probably approached this from the perspective let's get the team to ship so that we can build from there rather than building this 10year game like Clang or a Star Citizen type of an approach
and that's what I was asking like is this the like that would be the best way on mobile to kind of throw something out there but is it the best way on Steam where you're kind of putting something out there and people already have those expectations and it's much more sort of a brand driven. You can't just, you know, put something under a different developer name and kind of get the reps in before the big launch. So, that would be my assumption. Again, I don't know what they were thinking, why they were doing this this way, but I feel like they just wanted to get the reps in from launching.

Yep. [music]