#PLAYER UNKNOWN BATTLEGROUNDS PC SERVER HOST MODS#
Greene's parents were "really worried" that he was so focused on making free gaming mods and asked him if he was making any money from his hobby. Greene used the cash to pay for computer servers to host his gaming mods. The government gave him about 180 euros per week (or $202 US based on current exchange rates), he says. He was forced to move in with his parents and go on social welfare, the Irish equivalent of unemployment benefits, he says. In 2014, Greene says, he had finally saved enough money to move back to Ireland, but he had trouble finding work near his hometown of Kildare. (Epic Games' Fortnite and Electronic Arts' Apex Legends are also battle royale games.)
Greene describes the model as "a last-man-standing death-match," where a group of players are dropped in a harsh environment, scramble to find weapons and battle each other to the end. Greene even named his first mods after the movie, which helped establish him as a creator of the now huge "battle royale" genre. He drew inspiration from existing "survivor"-style mods created by the online community as well as cult-classic Japanese sci-fi film " Battle Royale," in which high school students are dropped on an island, given weapons and then forced to fight to the death. Game developers often encourage this type of engagement, even including suites of coding tools to help.Īs a part-time web designer, Greene knew enough basic coding to experiment with his own "mod" games. With mods, fans create their own custom versions of a video game by tweaking the source code to alter gameplay. Greene, who says he played everything from Atari 2700 growing up to Delta Force: Black Hawk Down on PlayStation 2 but was never a serious gamer, soon discovered the world of online video game "mods" (as in "modifications").