Unveiled during Opening Night Live 2026, PUBG: DED.NET is not a game mode coming to the PUBG battle royale experience many are familiar with, but is instead an entirely new experience altogether. This new game, then, promises to combine shooter gameplay with roguelite progress across runs, all set in a world inspired by the works of auteurs such as David Lynch and David Cronenberg.
To understand more about the makings of and inspirations behind PUBG: DED.NET, during gamescom 2026, I sat down to speak with PUBG creative director Dave Curd:
Hello and thank you so much for having me! How do you go from PUBG to PUBG: DED.NET? How did you get here as a studio?
Dave Curd: I was tasked by my boss with spreading the good word of PUBG with non-believers. So, we are almost a 10-year-old game: we’ve got millions of fans and we’re very fortunate. But, the game’s not for everybody, you know? So, you start looking at the automotive industry, weirdly. Like, Ford makes a Mustang, but should they only make Mustangs forever or should they also make a Bronco, you know? They serve different audiences. I think PUBG is an infinite story engine tool, so that got me to ask the question: “Could we be the first game to have a battle royale go on a multi-match journey and extend that story?”
So, that was the first idea that was like, okay, that can’t just be a mode for PUBG. A multi-match journey breaks the essence of PUBG which involves everyone starting on equal footing with only one player emerging as the winner. Most of us don’t get to win the chicken dinner. Most of us eat shit on a hot drop (land in a high-traffic area) and then it’s time to go to bed.
But, what if in this new game you hot drop on School, you get wrecked, you get killed in that little murder cabin and then you go back to the menu and we’re like: “Pick a card! Do you want to get a boombox that lets you play Wu-Tang Clan to heal your squad? Do you want to wield two weapons, maybe a shotgun and an AR? Do you want to hide in lockers like a pervert and jump out and kill people when they get close? Take a card and play one more game!”
To follow up on that point: how many cards are there and how diverse are they? And to what extent will they impact play styles?
Dave Curd: They’re extremely diverse. We have roughly 75 abilities that run the gauntlet of things you might expect like, for example, getting a chance to not use medkits but healing faster. But that’s the vanilla stuff. What I’m proud of is all the weird stuff like cannibalism, using a car door as a riot shield, hacking payphones to steal competitors’ money. Basically, we’ve got something for any kind of player fantasy.
And, also, in terms of injuries, I think currently we have 12, which includes everything from “it hurts when I swim” to “I have a nervous tick where I spam taunts and give myself away” to “I, occasionally, just throw my fucking gun down the hill when I weapon swap”.
One of my favorite ones is called “Stuntman”, and what it does is, when you slide or die, it will occasionally spawn a cool explosion behind you which could hurt you or hurt your squad mates. So, someone better than me at math in the team said there’s like millions of build possibilities. What we love about that roguelite structure is that, when you start a run, you select a deck of 10 abilities to get you rolling. These decks are all very role-oriented, so we have assault decks, support decks or even stuff like troll decks.
The more you play, on your account, we would introduce the masochist deck, which is composed only out of injury cards or, you know, we’d give you lots of different ways to play. But, when you start, you’ve got a general idea of where you want to go and what you want to do. So, say, during the next game you’d want to play support, and, after the first match, we make you choose between three cards. The first choice will be in the class you chose, but the other two will be wildly divergent. Our goal is to keep on offering you things that are tantalising enough to start breaking your run.
Early in a run, it’s all candy – we’re just giving you lots of cool shit – but, deeper in a run, we’ll be starting to shuffle injuries into your deck as well. So, during your first game, you have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to go because you only have 10 cards, but, deep in the run, in game four or game 5, you may have 25-30 cards out of which some will be injuries. And that’s where you start to get those interesting decisions and desperate scenarios I described earlier.
How exactly is PUBG: DED.NET structured? You mentioned that every game is made out of multiple matches, but does that mean you need to win all of them to get rewarded?
Dave Curd: So, the numbers of the matches are subject to change, not only as we develop the game, but also as you beat runs. For example, if you can win a five-game round, we’re going to ask you to do a seven-game round next time. So, there’s that. But, the concept of a multi-match journey…we have to think of a cool name for it, but, imagine you have like 100 career hit points.
So, if you’re the first one out, you might lose 20 of those 100. But, if you kind of finish in the middle of the pack, you might only lose five or 10 hit points. And, if you win the chicken dinner, you might replenish 20-25 hit points. So, as long as you’re playing pretty consistently, even if you have a bad game, you can get to the end of that five-round journey.
So, this would mean that a lot more people could win in PUBG: DED.NET, right?
Dave Curd: Yeah, exactly, because, you know, in a typical battle royale, one person wins, 99 other people lose. What’s more interesting is, we all want to win the chicken dinner, but, my satisfaction is also in chasing a build across a run. So, it’s like, okay, if I can just make it to top 3, that means I can extend this run. And then you can imagine, as we continue to develop the game, when you get to the end of your run, your five-round game, we might offer you a double or nothing. It’s going to be very hard but very fun.
What do you hope wins the non-PUBG player over? Is it the structure of DED.NET? Or the unpredictability that comes with putting together a deck of abilities and injuries?
Dave Curd: We’ve got a few weapons in our arsenal. Number one is pace: we’re leaner,meaner and more athletic. The next is persistence: having a multi-match journey is something novel and fresh; no one in this space is doing that, so people will try DED.NET for that. And then, our secret weapon is the evocative and specific world. We’re setting DED.NET in the mid 90s in my twist on David Lynch, Twin Peaks, X-Files, David Cronenberg body horror, the licensed music from the 90s like rap, gangster rap and alternative grunge…put it all through a grinder, put these crazy characters, put little two foot tall baby dolls and giant seven foot tall piggies and shake it up.
The result is something that you’ll love or hate and it’s something that is definitely trying to make a player that has, maybe, felt left out feel loved. When I was a teenager in the 90s, I worked at a theme park doing airbrush tattoos…it was a very weird job for a young man to have! But, my co-worker, Corey, smoked a ton of weed, he watched too many grindhouse movies and he stayed up playing the original Call of Duty Zombies. PUBG is not for him, but I wanted to make a game that would make Corey happy because I know there’s a lot of dudes like Corey that are being underserved right now.
However, from what I could tell from the trailer, so much of the identity of PUBG carries over into PUBG: DED.NET. So, how do the two games relate to one another?
Dave Curd: The map philosophy is right out of PUBG. I got my start on PUBG making maps, modes and experiences. So, Miramar, Sanhok, Deston…these came from the PUBG team based in Madison. So, our map philosophy has expanded and it’s become a more interactive, detail-rich and dense world. But, the soul of the maps is still there. In the trailer, we lovingly reference assets like the Level 3 Spetsnaz Helmet, but, ultimately, you can imagine DED.NET as my remix of what PUBG could be: it has desperate survival, it has interesting choices and it has infinite stories but these all come through a new lens for a new audience.
To what extent do you think DED.NET will appeal to battle royale players as well?
Dave Curd: To go back to that automotive metaphor: sometimes you want to go off-road and sometimes you want to go fast. So, DED.NET is not going to be for every PUBG fan. Our gunplay and our movement is so fundamentally different that I have to embrace that it’s not going to be for everybody.
But, I think by going very specific and very evocative, the folks we catch are going to be hooked. So, it’s going to be for some PUBG fans and it’s going to be a lot of first-person shooter fans that maybe haven’t found their favorite yet. And, of course, time flies, man! It’s been 10 years and we have a whole new batch of 18-year-olds that are ready to play their first M-rated game: we want DED.NET to be the one they try.
With the release of the trailer, you’ve also announced a closed beta for DED.NET. How does player feedback shape the future of your game?
Dave Curd: It shapes all of it! That’s fucking PUBG’s jam! That’s why, even though we came out 10 years ago, we’re doing better than ever. Making games is a handshake between the community and the developers. We can’t totally listen to them, but we can’t be prescriptive of exactly what the game will be, either. So, the reason we have this beta is to validate our assumptions.
Our games are hypotheses and the fans will let us know if they’re hot or cold. So, that’s why I’m stoked for this upcoming beta: because we’re not just only going to be reading surveys, and we read all of them, but we are also going to vigorously check what they did in game. When we’re getting this giant, total picture of how the game is being experienced, we will then be able to weigh it against what we hope the game can be.
To wrap up, how do you know which section of the fanbase to listen to? Is there compromise between what you, as the developers, would like to do and what the fanbase is asking for?
Dave Curd: That’s a good question to end on. So, we have to have a point of view and we have to bring something unique and interesting to the table, I think, in 2026, to cut through the noise of a million great games. So, that means, by nature of making very specific pointed choices, some fans are really going to love it and some fans will hate it. You have to be okay with the idea that the game can’t be for everybody.
Because, if you make a game that everyone only kinda likes…they’re not going to get off their main game to play the average shooter that does nothing wrong but nothing amazing either. So, we have to think deeply about all feedback and, if it kind of aligns with our vision of the product, that’s a very easy choice to make. But, if it’s contrary to what the product wants to be, when it grows up, that’s a more difficult conversation.
So, instead of saying no, we look at the data: let’s interrogate how the game is playing, not what people are saying. TL;DR: you can’t listen to all the community and streamers are incredibly valuable because they advocate for your game, but their perspectives are dangerously narrow because they play games for a living and they are that tippity-top peak gamer. And, if you make a game just for the very top, you will alienate 99% of your base. There is no “silver bullet”, but there is a lot of trying to find the best decision with the data you have.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Dave Curd: Please go to DED.NET and sign up for the beta. If you like raw, unhinged, points of view and if you’re willing to try something that no one is doing, I think this is the game for you.
