How is the creator of PUBG’s next game different from Hello Games’ upcoming Light No Fire? Well, for starters it’s “not a game”, apparently

Brendan Greene, the creator of PUBG, says his next game isn’t like Hello Games’ Light No Fire because he’s “not making a game.”

When you hear about the concept for Project Artemis, the ambitious follow-up to Greene’s very successful PUBG, you might think that it sounds a little bit like No Man’s Sky. Artemis is described as an “Earth-scale” open-world sandbox, and obviously the key gimmick of No Man’s Sky is that all of its planets are realistically (more or less) sized, meaning they’re difficult to fully explore. Hello Games is scaling back a touch with its next game, Light No Fire, also an open-world sandbox game that takes place on a single planet that’s roughly the size of our own planet, which sounds even more like Greene’s Artemis.

Speaking to GamesRadar, however, the PUBG creator explained the differences between his game and Light no Fire, noting how Hello Game’s title is “procedural” as opposed to Artemis, which uses machine-learning tech. “I don’t know their tech stack, so I’m not super familiar with the way they generate stuff, but I don’t think it’s the same goal at the end, which is providing an open-source holodeck,” Greene explains. “And that’s the difference. I think most people are making games. I’m not making a game, I’m building a world.”

I don’t know about you, but that framing ironically reminds me of No Man’s Sky’s early days, which perhaps over promised on certain aspects of the game (though in the years since it has been fleshed out exponentially). Still, really the big thing for Green is that he doesn’t “want to make games for people, I want to make games with people,” continuing on to explain that “if you give the player or the community the means to generate their own experiences, they’ll go ham.”

We’ve obviously seen tactics like that find a lot of success in games like Fortnite and Roblox, but Green has previously said that Project Artemis could be up to a decade away still, so whether that’s something players will even still want by then is really up in the air. Though it’s not a game, as Greene says, so maybe that won’t matter! I guess we’ll find out in 2035.