It appears that the war between PUBG and Fortnite is heating up once again and depending on what happens, you might pay the price (but probably not). Ever since Fortnite began to eclipse PUBG in terms of money and players, PUBG has continually been on the defensive. After pulling in and estimated $296 million for April, Fortnite has been on the top of the F2P Battle Royale games and PUBG is feeling the pain.
Now, PUBG is taking Fortnite’s creator, Epic Games to court over copyright infringement. Bluehole, the company that owns PUBG has been vocal about the similarities since the Battle Royale mode was released, stated in a statement at the time, addressed “growing concerns” about the similarities. In the statement, they stated:
“After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves,” the developer wrote, “we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.”
and ever since, PUBG has been plagued with bugs and glitches since its open beta last year, while Fortnite has continued to flourish. It is also worth noting that this is coming at a very interesting time as since the beginning of the year, PUBG has been consistently declining in its playerbase (halved since January 2018) while Fortnite’s has only grown to astronomical levels (45 million players with 3 million concurrent players).
It appears that instead of investing into making your game more appealing to pull players away, they are grasping at straws trying to target Fortnite and Epic Games by saying they were first to the Battle Roayle craze, but its stated that its not who does it first, but who does it better. Hopefully, the Judge will throw this case out as really there is no clear way you can “own” the Battle Royale game mode and with their previous attempts to take down the Battle Royale mobile clones, PUBG is in for quite the fight. Hopefully, PUBG learns to look to innovate their game rather than attack the competitors with meaningless lawsuits.
