Development on Prologue: Go Wayback is ending as PlayerUnknown Productions lays off an unspecified amount of staff
I guess we’re not going to find out what comes after the prologue after all. By that I mean, some bad news came out of PlayerUnknown Productions yesterday. The studio shared a statement on their Dwitter account to share that development on Prologue: Go Wayback is ending, as PlayerUnknown himself Brendan Greene says that he has “reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form.”
“As a result, I have made the hard decision to restructure the studio,” the statement continues. By this he means that an undisclosed number of staff members have been laid off, with only a “smaller team” now working on Melba, the studio’s in-development game engine. “Our immediate priority is to support our affected employees to the best of our abilities during this difficult transition.” For those that don’t know what Melba is, it’s essentially Greene’s attempt at making a game engine that theoretically allows for making “true earth-sized” games, which is achieved with “machine learning agents” that run on your own system.
What this means for Prologue: Go Wayback, which was released as an early access game, is that it will be released for free with its next update. Those that bought the game on Steam or Epic may also be able to get a refund, as PlayerUnknown Productions are apparently seeking a way to make this possible. On Steam, more or less the same details were offered, but it did also note that they “hope the studio can return to Go Wayback at a future point in time.”
Prologue: Go Wayback only launched back in November of last year, but didn’t seem to make too much of an impact in the months since. Our own Edwin had a look at it in early 2025, coming away with some apprehension towards the machine learning aspect while still finding some intrigue within it, writing, “In the demo I played, each run began inside a randomly placed forest cabin, with a pan of water bubbling on a stove ring nearby. I like that pan of water. It’s a pleasing little designer’s goad: was somebody making tea, before you arrived? Sterilising ground water? You hear a generator throbbing outside and you think, ah, I should probably turn off the stove to avoid wasting power, and then you discover that each ring on the stove can be flicked on or off individually. Nice.””