Brendan Greene’s first major game after PUBG is ending on a difficult note. Prologue: Go Wayback! was supposed to be the first playable step toward a much larger survival vision, but PlayerUnknown Productions is now cutting back, shrinking the team, and stopping active development after one final update.
The game will become free for future players, but this is not a victory lap. It is the result of a studio no longer being able to fund the project at the scale it originally planned.
Prologue: Go Wayback! launched in Early Access as a paid survival game built around harsh wilderness, procedural terrain, and navigation without easy modern guidance. Players had to manage weather, hunger, thirst, and distance while trying to reach a remote weather tower.
That foundation is still there, but the longer roadmap is no longer moving forward. PlayerUnknown Productions says it is restructuring into a smaller team, with one last update planned before development pauses.
For players who bought in early, that changes the promise around the game. Early Access usually means a project is still growing. Here, the game is being closed off before it reaches the version many buyers expected.
The disappointment is not only about one survival game. Greene’s team had positioned Prologue as the first step toward Project Artemis, an ambitious plan built around massive generated worlds and the studio’s Melba technology.
That made the project interesting even before it had all its pieces. This was not Greene trying to make another battle royale after PUBG. It was an attempt to build something slower, stranger, and more experimental.
The problem is that ambition needs time and money. PlayerUnknown Productions now appears to be choosing survival as a studio over continuing the game’s Early Access plan in its original form.
The studio is looking into refunds for players who purchased Prologue: Go Wayback! on Steam and the Epic Games Store. That is the right move, but players still need a clear process and timeline.
People who paid for the game were not just buying what existed on day one. They were also buying into the idea that the game would keep growing.
Now that the plan has changed, those players deserve simple instructions on what happens next, whether they keep access, and how refund requests will be handled.
PlayerUnknown Productions is not shutting down completely. A smaller team is expected to keep working on Melba, the technology behind the studio’s larger world-generation goals.
That leaves some part of Greene’s original vision alive, but players should not treat it as a promise that Prologue will return to full development. For now, the survival game is being scaled back, its roadmap is effectively over, and its free release will let curious players see what the team built before the project changed direction.
