When it comes to Battle Royale shooters, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) is THE reference that everyone has to measure themselves against at the moment. More simultaneous players on Steam than Dota 2 or CS: GO, over 10 million copies sold the success story doesn't seem to stop.
Of course, such a success makes for imitators, so the structure has shooter Fortnite announced his own Battle Royale mode and this should even be free.
The PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS team likes this development Bluehole nothing special. Although Bluehole is the Unreal Engine from Fortnite developer Epic used, the relationship between the two companies has cooled significantly.
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS - Afraid of the competition?
Imitators and similar concepts, some of which are on the verge of plagiarism, are nothing special in the games industry. Even PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS is actually not an original idea that only Bluehole came up with.
The making of Battle Royale Play (named after a Japanese film from 2000) Brendan "Playerunknown" Green attributed. He was one of the first to implement this in an ARMA 2 and 3 Mod. This later resulted in the game H1Z1, which was divided into a survival part with zombie and a battle royale mode. Green was also involved in the H1Z1 Battle Royale. Only then did PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS appear as a pure 100% battle royale shooter, which catapulted the genre to the top of all hit parades.
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What upsets the minds at Bluehole could be the fact that Epic and the Fortnite developers advertise relatively blatantly with the reference to Battlegrounds. So says the Epic developer Donald Mustard in the Fortnite: Battle Royale trailer: "At Epic, were huge fans of the battle royale genre, and games like PUBG and H1Z1."
"We at Epic are huge fans of the Battle Royal genre and games like PUBG and H1Z1".
The line appears in the associated blog post "We love Battle Royale games like PUBG and thought Fortnite would make a great foundation for our own version."
"We love Battle Royale games like PUBG and thought Fortnite would be a great base for our own version"
Bluehole is considering further steps
Chang Han Kim from Bluehole has already announced that Bluehole "reserves the right to take appropriate steps" because the similarity of the features would be too great in their eyes. Many elements that Epic would like to implement in Fortnite are the characteristics that have made PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS such an immense success.
It will be interesting to see what steps Bluehole is now taking. The idea of a Battle Royale mode and the name are not protected by copyright, clarifying the whole thing in court could take years.
