PlayerUnknown Productions has announced that it is preparing a wave of layoffs and is halting the development of the title Prologue: Go Wayback, which was in early access. Prologue was described by the studio as a single-player open-world survival roguelike where every journey is unique; the title originally launched in November 2025 in early access.
The studio's founder, Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, addressed the issue in an official statement, saying that the studio can unfortunately no longer support the development and has shut down the project and plans to downsize the team.
"When PlayerUnknown Productions became an independent studio in 2021, we embarked on a journey to realize an ambitious vision for the future. Our goal was to develop technology that could break the boundaries of scale in terms of how large worlds in video games can be. To achieve this, our team created Melba technology and applied it in the title Prologue: Go Wayback.
Greene added that: "Unfortunately, I have reached the limit of what I can currently finance for this project. As a result, I made the difficult decision to restructure the studio; while we will continue the development of Melba with a smaller team, we are stopping all further work on Prologue: Go Wayback. Our primary goal will be to support the affected employees during this difficult transition."
"We plan to make Prologue: Go Wayback free for all future players in an upcoming update. We are also exploring how to offer refunds to players who purchased the game via Steam and Epic Games Store, and we will have more information soon. Finally, I want to thank the community and everyone who has been involved in supporting our studio on this journey."
A similar announcement was posted on the game's Steam page: "While we hope to return to working on Prologue: Go Wayback at some point, we currently cannot finalize plans for the early access phase."
