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PlayerUnknown’s Battleground’s creator, Brendan Greene, is stepping down from the battle royale’s development team.

In a tweet posted to his personal Twitter account (thanks, GMG), Greene – who’s Twitter profile now lists him as "director, Special Projects @ PUBG" – said he was moving away from active development on the hugely successful battle royale game and relocating to Amsterdam for his new venture. From what he says, his next project is unlikely to be another battle royale.

"The past five years of my life has been all about battle royale. From the early days working on a mod to getting the chance to create my vision for a battle royale title, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds," Greene said.

"It’s been an incredible journey and our game has reached heights I never thought possible. Seeing the game grow into what it is today has been a dream come true and I can’t thank our fans and the incredible team at PUBG Corporation enough."

And now for something completely different… pic.twitter.com/f9qpkHMHu8 — PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) March 13, 2019

"Today, I’m excited to announce that my new day-to-day focus will be heading up a new division of PUBG Corp.: PUBG Special Projects. While I’ll remain as a consulting creative director on PUBG, development will be led by Taeseok Jang and the fantastic team I have had the honour of working with over the last three years."

Greene goes on to add that while "we are tasked with exploring, experimenting, and creating new technologies, tools, pipelines, and gameplay" for him, "it is more than that".

"Together with a team of game developers and researchers, we will explore new possibilities of interaction and connection within the game space," he said.

While Greene has not detailed the precise focus of PUBG Special Projects, he did invite anyone interesting in joining the team in Amsterdam to take a look at careers.pubg.com.

PUBG Mobile now has 200 million players – putting the mobile game on par with Epic Games’ fan-favourite, Fortnite. This 200 million figure isn’t even inclusive of China’s mobile players or PUBG’s 50 million console and PC user bases, which means there may be millions more yet to be taken into account when considering the franchise as a whole.

PUBG Mobile was finally released to Western audiences in March 2018. Mobile PUBG, created in partnership with Chinese tech megacorp Tencent, was soft launched on the Canadian Google Play store. The game was billed as the "officially licensed PUBG on mobile", offering an impressive mobile version of the full console experience.