The Battle Royale between Battlegrounds and Fortnite has started

PUBG is a clone of a clone of a clone. It’s a very good one, but they didn’t invent the genre. Bluehole also made Devilian which is a pretty naked Diablo clone, making their objections a bit rich.

One man standing rules were common, but I haven’t seen the battle royale mechanic of shrinking the playable zone over time before. Did anyone do it before that guy’s ARMA mod?

It kinda doesn’t matter than Player Unknown originated it when he’s basically sold the idea to multiple companies at this point. How can Bluepoint claim to own the mechanic when he made a game with Daybreak that used it first?

He never said he owns the mechanic, he’s just pissed that Epic literally used his game in an advertisement for their clone.

Epic are idiots because mentioning your competition just reminds or advertises to your customers said competition.

Well yeah, except Epic’s clone is completely free while PUBG costs money, and Epic’s version is supposedly really great too.

Because Daybreak actually licensed the concept from him?

There’s obviously more to this as well.

  1. Bluehole have paid ton of money in royalties to Epic, and also shares tech (e.g. prior to PUBG there was no UE game supporting 100 players). This is basically Epic saying Fuck You to a business partner they’ve profited off handsomely.

  2. Tencent, a large shareholder in Epic, recently failed in a buyout of Bluehole. This may explain the Fuck You.

My take is that Bluehole hasn’t handled the PR here well, but let’s not pretend Epic is acting Just Fine here.

Well, yeah. That’s the question I’m asking. Can PU demonstrate sole ownership of the concept? What was the nature of his business relationship with Daybreak, Bluepoint and anyone else he may have worked with/for? Is there anyone who collaborated with him during his modding days that may step forward with their own claim?

Is anyone questioning the legality of it? It’s more of a stupid business relations move, not anything illegal.

I don’t know how else you’d interpret the “we’re going to have our lawyers look into it” statement.

I think he implicitly means is anyone who doesn’t have a financial stake in the legality of it questioning the legality of it.

I interpret it as “we’re going to pay an IP lawyer many hundreds of dollars an hour to educate us on how ideas can’t be copyrighted and competitors are allowed to mention your trademarks as comparative products.”

And stole game code from NCSoft for Lineage 3. Not exactly relevant, but there’s a bit of irony there.

Bluehole comes off as overly whiny here.

… people understands that every ‘standard’ game mode that we take for granted like DM, TDM, CTF, Domination, Last Man Standing, Payload, King of the Hill… at some point there weren’t standard. Someone, at some point, created them for the first time, and there was one game that was the first one in implementing them.

I don’t know how this is different.

Or all the MOBA games, that ‘copied’ the entire idea from the original DOTA.

It’s a hard thing to deliberately replicate jank.

What’s funny is that it shows (if it wasn’t obviously clear) Fortnite is of those 100% follow-the-leader sort of games that exists purely to hit a certain kind of game in a certain market; nobody was inspired to make Fortnite, this was a 9to5 game if there ever was one. This pivot toward PUBG means they just predicted wrong what sort of game was going to take off.

Funny thing is that I’ve been enjoying fortnite more than any other game since it hit early release. Glad everyone has their own taste, and that this one matches up with mine. Haven’t played the PUBG part yet, and don’t really plan to.

For what it’s worth, I think PUBG looks fun, but a bit… dry. I don’t think it needs skill trees, classes, unlockables and all that jazz, sometimes it’s better to keep things pure, but isn’t it the same crappy building everywhere? It still somehow managed to fit microtransactions/loot crates/whatever in there, though.

I’d be curious how building works in Fortnite Battle Royale. If anything, it seems to me like it would encourage camping, which is exactly what you’re trying to prevent in a battle royale game.

Boo-fucking-hoo everything successful in gaming gets cloned - genres, mechanics all of it.

The structures break really quite easily in Fortnite - so as much as they offer protection, it takes some time to build them - building them is noisy - and they can be “shot down/out”

It could be helpful to build a little bit of cover to “get away” I’ve also seen some people build a bunker… those that “bunker in” tend to not last long though.