PUBG: Ded.Net Is “The ‘90s Put Through A Meat Grinder”

PUBG: Ded.Net Wants You To “Love It Or Hate It” - Just Don’t Be Indifferent Published Sep 2, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Meg is an Executive Editor and Technical Lead for TheGamer, and has been working within the gaming industry since 2014. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the GameHers Journalist of the Year award in 2022 and was a juror for the BAFTA Games Awards 2026. Some of the games and genres that Meg is an expert in include RPGs, point-and-clicks, puzzle games, and life sims. She has a particular fondness for Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy 14 (for which she used to run a weekly community column). Sign in to your TheGamer account PUBG: Ded.Net was revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, a new shooter with roguelike elements that was introduced to us in spectacular fashion, kicking, screaming, and sliding like a snake down hills in a shower of bullets and explosions. After the reveal, I spoke with creative director Dave Curd about bringing this epic new entry to the beloved franchise. Ded.Net is set in a fictionalised 1996, and Curd tells me one of his favourite films of that era was The Big Lebowski. “There's this quote of, ‘Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you’. This is a game about big highs and big lows, where sometimes you are getting absolutely stomped out, but then it feels really good when you know you're just denying someone else's fun and sending them off sad.” Losing Doesn't Mean Your Ded.Net Run Is Over What sets Ded.Net apart is that when you lose, it’s not immediately game over, as you can continue the unpredictable wild ride. The game offers runs that you can build off, so you’re not really considering each match as a standalone win-or-lose situation. “What's really neat about our game is, in most battle royales, you might hot drop and lose, and you're like, ‘Alright, maybe it's time for bed’. But in our game, even if someone blasts you and totally shuts you down and makes you sad, you're immediately off to the out game, where we offer some new powers and injuries and abilities to consider. “Even if you're coming off a bad game, you might say, ‘Oh, the boombox power showed up, or the akimbo power showed up, so my build's coming online; maybe we should play one more game’. I think that you can't win every game, but every game you're on a rising path takes the edge off of occasionally getting killed by a guy with knife hands or a baby doll.” Blending PUBG with roguelike progression was “super natural”, Curd tells me. “The two things between PUBG Classic and PUBG DeadNet are pace and persistence. We knew we had to do both. To make the rogue stuff work, we had to have fighting, life, death, less friction. It's easy to get in, it's easy to take fights, it's easy to come back, and then even if you ultimately lose, it's easy to grab the power and keep going.” He tells me that Ded.Net didn’t start as a project where the team knew the idea immediately and fought like hell to make it. “This was experiment 19, and we're like, ‘Oh sh*t, there's really something here. Now, finally, the gameplay is so fun. Let's start inventing characters and talking about the arc crate that comes down and opens up, and it's actually a room you can get into, and it's a room you can camp. Once we felt that the idea was solid, then we began the fun work of building a world and creating characters for that world.” Ded.Net Learned That Being Weird Was More Fun Than Being Realistic Curd tells me that when the team was challenged to do their take on PUBG, the first thing they did was “compare and contrast” what PUBG was doing and consider what they could do differently. “I've called PUBG the ultimate storytelling engine, because each game is an adventure, and I just thought, ‘Well, could that story have multiple chapters? Could you take an avatar on a longer story, where win or lose, you're still having fun?’ The “cheeky name” for it in V1 was Body Persistence, where Curd tells me if you swam too much, you started sneezing, if you were in the smoke too long, you started coughing. “We realised pretty quickly that super changed the way people played. They're like, ‘Now I'm never going in the lake, and I'm never going in the smoke, and I don't want to be sick’. So we learned the injuries should be more fun, and they should not be a direct result of gameplay action. You could get rocked in the head, and then you'd have ringing ears, and it just makes players sad.” One of the injuries caused players to fumble their weapon on weapon swap, leading to the gun sailing out of your hand and the character cursing and getting mad. “That's where we started finding the vibe of like, ‘Okay, if everyone's in on the joke, and it's not too punishing, this helps tell stories.” Curd tells me that they realised “V1 was very punitive, and we're like, ‘Oh, this isn't fun, don't do that’”, but interestingly, the team is well aware that some players like to push themselves to the extreme. When you start a run in Ded.Net, you choose a simple archetype, and as you complete runs, more loadouts will become available to you. “One of the first ones we came up with was called Masochist, and that's all injuries, no powers. So it's just, ‘Hey, do you want it to be that it hurts when you swim, and you can't quite jump very high, so you never quite get through the windows.” So if you feel like playing as if you’re trapped in the body of an elderly person, you can. “The pitch internally was you're playing PUBG, and you're looking out the window with a sniper rifle, and it's that thing you see in every PUBG where someone's off in the field, but in our game, they'd be limping. And you'd be like, ‘Oh, this character's seen some shit’. But then, of course, you make it, and you're like, ‘Yeah, nobody's f*cking power fantasy is to limp around the map. That's when we got on to like, ‘Okay, occasionally sneeze. Occasionally have a tick where you have to fire your taunts off, whether you want to or not. That's the stuff that we've seen make people smile.” There were other areas where more realism wouldn’t have worked well, for example, with the cannibalism perk. “What's really great is our EPD, who's now the head of global publishing, T.S. Chang. He's a super cool guy, super big deal. He's like, ‘Man, I don't want to see someone eat a liver in my franchise’. And I was like, ‘No problem, boss’. So what we do is the old kind of Looney Tunes: if you have cannibalism and you see a dead body, you get the cartoon hallucination of the chicken. So now you can break off the chicken drummy, and everyone else sees you over a body, but in first person, it's just delicious chicken.” The PUBG Ded.Net trailer gave us a taste of just how wild and quirky the game can be, and Curd tells me he feels that it’s his “responsibility to entertain and help people tell stories”, and that Ded.Net is very much about allowing players to create new stories. “You can very systematically think about experiences that you've maybe always wanted to try, but haven't yet found a game that allows that to happen. We certainly had a backlog of things that we thought would be fun, but just didn't fit PUBG. Our kind of vibe framework, it's a little silly name, we call it Grunge House. Grunge would be like that ‘90s alternative spirit, and then the house is kind of a pun on Grindhouse films. “I think Tarantino had a quote about how he loved going to these all-black cinemas when he was 12 and 13 with his mom's boyfriend, because in those films, he would see something very evocative, and it gave him this feeling of, ‘I'm seeing something naughty and getting away with it.’ And that's why everyone was breaking the tension and laughing, because we're all seeing something naughty and laughing together. That really resonated with me, because I try to have fun and have a slightly dark sense of humour. I've been playing shooters and working on shooters for 20 years, so I need things that make me laugh, and make my co-workers laugh, and eventually make the fans laugh. That's how we know it's a good idea.” Ded.Net Wants Players To Find Things The Developers Never Expected PUBG has been going for almost a decade now, and Curd has also worked on the likes of Call of Duty, Singularity, mobile, and says “if you're a good developer, you're hopefully taking lessons from every win and every loss”. “What PUBG has taught me specifically is that you don't need a thousand-person team to make a great game. In fact, I think lean teams, starving teams, innovate and try weird sh*t and find the fun quick. Fans will forgive big swings; the only thing they won't forgive is being bored. So people that are seeing this trailer, I want them to have a love it or hate it reaction. I don't want indifference. If people are like, ‘Ah, this isn't what I wanted’, or like, ‘Holy shit, that looks cool’, we're in a good spot. “You build it with the fans. Creating a game is a handshake between developer and audience. As soon as the game was stable enough to start having private playtests and smaller playtests, we started having folks in. We've been having people join us for Friday playtests since October of last year, and it's really been nice because we've had some streamers that just stopped streaming for two hours on Friday. They don't talk about it, they're not getting paid for it, they just want to keep coming back and trying the game.” Through playtesting, the team were surprised by a build that they didn’t consider useful initially, but then saw players using effectively. They call it the Snake Blade build, and it utilises the power that the trailer showcases that lets you move super fast on your stomach, with the machete arms and the Creeper power thatlets you hide in refrigerators and wait for people. “In our last playtest, that was a meta that emerged that was shockingly effective. We'd have to come back and tune, get the lab balanced a little bit, but that's the beauty of bringing in the fans that are like, I'm going to play this ten hours in a row. They will start finding things that you never would have thought of. The worst thing in the world when you have a test is to get back expected results. Because then why do you even test? They help pressure test what's too salty, what's too sweet, and they show us new ways to play.” Curd prefers the troll-like shenanigan builds that allow you to hide in lockers, eat bodies, or hack payphones so that when other players try to buy their friend back, instead the money goes to him and players get a message pop up that they’ve been hacked. “Setting up a trap in one of those Trekmeister trucks so that it'll explode once it's driven one mile, so you'll just be hanging out, and you'll just get that kill notification. Oh, that paid off, I'm glad I did that.” Another favourite for Curd is defence support builds: “The one I really like is using the car doors, the riot shield and the boombox to play our licensed music like Nine Inch Nails or Wu-Tang Clan. That's doing a healing aura for all your squad mates that are near you, so then you become the target, and they're like, ‘Oh my God, kill that guy who's playing music!’ But you've got the door shield, and you're like, ‘Ah, come here’. Then hopefully your team is working like a pack, and that's a really satisfying way to play.” We slip into discussing ‘90s music, and Curd tells me, “We really wanted to do something with Nirvana, but very naturally the estate is sensitive to gun violence. Internally, because our publishers had experience licensing Blackpink, paid collabs, but they had never done a radio station, so they were really sensitive to, is this possible?” Curd ended up scouring LinkedIn and found music supervisors who worked on Just Dance and Guitar Hero, and they “knew all the right people to call and how to run down all the rights” to allow the project to come to fruition. “It was a dream come true to have some music that literally made me who I am as an artist now in the jukeboxes in this game for a new generation to hear.” Surprisingly, it wasn’t that important for Ded.Net to feel recognisably PUBG. While they have nods to PUBG, such as Reyna in the trailer leaving the care package and throwing down the Level 3 Helmet, Curd says “we're not trying to make a sequel, we're not trying to make more of the same. We're intentionally trying to reach a new audience and spread the gospel of survival of the fittest.” and he was just told “Dave, you've got an idea. You believe in it. We believe in you. Don't fuck up the IP. Don't eat livers.” Curd hopes that after a few hours with Ded.Net, he wants players “thinking about BuildChase. I want them thinking about, ‘Oh man, I got killed in a really unusual way. Got eaten by a guy. A baby doll with a drill arm jumped on my back and was stealing my loot and drilling me in the neck. I would like to do that to somebody else. Once you start imagining the possibilities of where you can take a character compared to other competitive shooters, I think if you're dreaming, if you're using your imagination, we've got you. That's the goal, for people to dream. “I'm supported by an incredible team, and they've empowered me to say, here's my weird version of the 90s put through a meat grinder with the music that you remember, but strange game-breaking abilities and a dark web streaming show all mushed together.” The next build will apparently be “a little bit more bloody” and “a little bit more intense”, and though he can’t promise anything, Curd’s trying to get Dismemberment in as a perk. So if you fancy a wild run with blood, guts, guns, and the unpredictable nature of players and their builds, PUBG: Ded.Net is for you. Developer(s) PUBG Madison Publisher(s) Krafton Multiplayer Online Multiplayer Franchise PUBG Number of Players Single-player