Well, they did, in their ads, compare themselves directly with PUBG and have admitted they copied it.
As I said before, hey, you guys like Fortnite, that’s great. Let’s not pretend that they did something ultra cool here.
I don’t really think Epic leveraged tech from PUBG in adapting their preexisting game to battle royale. Nothing illegal. That said, they did clone one of their licensees, and they did it insanely fast.
They really are the same game, and saying otherwise is silly. Yes Fortnite has the building stuff from its base game and PUBG has vehicles, but that’s like the difference between LOL and DOTA2. They aren’t identical, and cognoscenti of the genre may detect a faint hint of succotash on the terroir of one vintage versus another’s tannic effervescence on the back of the tongue, but for us plain folk, they’re both red wine.
I dunno I play with a few hardcore PUBG people through a friend and they swear Fortnite is silly cartoon bullshit whereas PUBG is “real”.
I dunno why you would be so butthurt over this though Jason. It’s like Unreal Tournament vs. Quake. If you actually play both cough @stusser they aren’t that similar, certainly not carbon copy clones.
But they did do something ultra cool. They made a great game. Why does that bug you so much? Are you invested in Bluehole or something? I don’t get it.
@stusser Were people all pissed at Valve for DOTA2? Are they still? I don’t recall people saying Epic should be sued by id because Unreal Tournament was a shooter like Quake III Arena even though they came out within three days of one another or vice versa?
@wumpus beat me to it.
And that whole “real” vs. “cartoon bullshit” is exactly why I’m enjoying Fortnite and never really cared a lick about PUBG. I’ve had my fill of “real” videogames. I like games a lot better when they have fantasy elements that couldn’t be done in the real world. Not only is it more creative, it’s something I simply can’t get in any other form of entertainment.
They took a game I did like and added a giant queue with a lackluster version of another game I like. I actually PAID for this game, unlike most of the people who have shit it up.
I said Valve should be sued by LoL at the time. I still say that DOTA 2 is a giant piece of shit.
What about Heroes of the Storm? Paladins? These also give you chest pains?
Yeah, lots of people were pissed off at Valve for DOTA2. The main difference is that LoL released in 2009 while DOTA2 started open beta testing in like 2011. Also it’s a bit less clear-cut about copying as of course DOTA started the genre as a warcraft 3 mod and the devs joined Valve to build DOTA2.
Copying the flavor of the month is nothing new, DOOM, Everquest, and LoL were all FOTM and had tons of clones. The difference here is that Epic managed to clone PUBG unprecedentedly fast while it was still in the honeymoon phase, undercut its price, and steal its lunch. That hasn’t happened before.
Heroes of the Storm came out years after LoL and DOTA 2 and was also involved in a giant lawsuit. I also think Paladins is horrible.
Wow. I should take all those folks back to 1980 when there were eight billion Pac-Man clones. Maybe we could find out if it’s possible to make games that sort of look like another one and even play similarly and if that’s legal or not?
OH WAIT, WE DID THAT ALREADY!
I addressed that point, did I not?
That’s a completely unfair view of both of these situations.
Valve hired IceFrog, who inherited the DOTA stuff from DOTA Allstars, aka the people who made League of Legends, and then immediately paid him to copy a game he didn’t design, to the T, that stole a lot of peoples, not IceFrogs, work.
Stusser points out the issues I have with Fortnite/PUBG from an ethical standpoint. I do not know the law, but it seems shitty. So sue me. Or not. I don’t know if you can.
Your edit came in after my post.
PUBG was released to early access in March 2017. Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode came in September of 2017. Six months for that addition to Fortnite seems reasonable to me given how closely the rest of it hews to the original PvE version of Fortnite. I really don’t see the issue.
Also, Epic had a history with free to play games already and Sweeney was talking about that being the way to go for a long time now so that they made it free isn’t a surprise either.
Back in 1980 they cranked out clones within a few months. This is really nothing new at all.
If they want to explore free to play, they should separate the game queues. I didn’t pay so a lot of people can ruin the game for me.
Not aware of any legal issue, but it is unprecedented for a license holder to clone one of its licensees and then undercut deeply on price in such an incredibly short timeframe. It’s a bit scummy.
I mean, PUBG and Epic had a preexisting business relationship and then Epic just rose up and screwed them to the wall.
You said that much better than I tried to. :)
So they were even more ready to implement this mode than I thought…
Art and design
In their initial prototypes of the game, Epic had used more creepier and darker designs for the husks and other enemies. Bleszinski said that they found this to create an “exhaustive environment” that was too grim, and designed to take the design in a more cartoonish approach, while still remaining creepy, so that players would enjoy spending time in the game’s world, without competing with games like DayZ.[18] They used works from Pixar, Tim Burton, and Looney Tunes as inspiration for the designs.[18][39]Fortnite uses procedural generation to build out the maps for each mission. The game also includes an “AI director” that monitors how players are progressing, and alters the challenges of the monsters it sends out to the players based on that progression, easing off if players are having greater difficulty in surviving.[40] At one point, the game had a team-based player versus player mode, where each side attempted to build up a base around a central target while trying to attack the opponent’s target after breaking through their base. This did not make it into the final game.[40]
The original Fortnite design had a PvP mode. Also, to go along with the discussion of grim vs. cartoon, they obviously researched that and found out it was a lot more appealing to be cartoon-like. (I don’t recall if that was in this thread or the journalism one.) I think you guys are creating smoke where there’s zero fire.
I think that’s fair. Epic didn’t behave like Paragons (snicker) of virtue here, they just didn’t do anything illegal. Certainly stealing game ideas isn’t in any way illegal, the whole industry is based on taking ideas and adding a twist (or hell, just making your own version).
If you can’t see what Epic did as shitty, even a little, I’m not sure there’s anywhere to go with this. So yeah, they’re very inventive and above board.
I never said 1 vs. 100 or 4 vs. 100 was “inventive”, but I don’t think it’s something you can hang your hat on as some massive innovation when as noted before the whole idea came from a movie that’s many years old now.
Also…
Looks like it was a Minecraft mod first before the PlayerUnknown guy ripped it off from that, or Ark: Survival Evolved, which had a mode like it in 2012. The original mod for ARMA 2 was based on the movie Battle Royale in fact! Those guys have a case!
I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with any of the arguments here. Both games are very successful. One is free and one sold over 20 million at $30 a pop. Nobody is going away empty handed and all of them have someone else to thank for the idea behind their success.