Brendan Greene on Fortnite: 'I've tried to combat the perception that I want other people's games to die'

After giving a talk at GDC about his journey from a DayZ and Arma modder to the creative director of PUBG Corp., Brendan Greene was asked an inevitable question from a member of the audience: "What are your thoughts on Fortnite?"

"I have many thoughts," Greene said. 

"No, it's great," he continued after some laughter from the crowd. "I mean it's great that the battle royale space is expanding, and that Fortnite is getting [the] battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That's it, really."

Greene followed up with some thoughts on how developers are often seen to be pitted against one another in a competition where only one game can come out on top while the others are destroyed—something he thinks is far from accurate.

"I get asked these questions sometimes, like, what do you do to combat this? When [PUBG] came out, we were killing [H1Z1]. When H1 came out it was killing Arma 3. We never set out to kill these games. I don't understand this attitude, like, 'you're dead'. We're all relatively friendly here. We don't have a real life GDC battle royale."

"I've really tried to combat that perception that I want other people's games to die," he continued. "It's great that more people are exploring the space and more people are getting to play games."

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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