Korean company PUBG, a subsidiary of Bluehole, has dropped its lawsuit against Fortnite makers Epic Games. The PUBG owners originally filed the lawsuit earlier this year, alleging copyright infringement against Epic Games. While PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds soared in popularity last year, Epic Games introduced its own battle royale mode in Fortnite with similar features all built on the same Unreal Engine 4 that was created and licensed by Epic Games.
Bloomberg reports that the lawsuit has been dropped, but it’s not clear why and whether there was any settlement between PUBG and Epic Games. PUBG developer Bluehole previously revealed it had “growing concerns” about the similarities between the two games, and it’s a battle that seemed to be boiling over into the courts with this lawsuit.
Both Epic Games and PUBG developer Bluehole are part-owned by Tencent Holdings, and Tencent has reportedly been nearing a deal to increase its PUBG investment to 10 percent. While it’s unlikely a copyright infringement accusation could complicate that deal, the lawsuit would be difficult to prove and win particularly when Fortnite has copied PUBG’s ideas and not necessarily its content.
Fortnite continues to grow in popularity despite the squabbles. Fortnite surpassed PUBG in monthly revenue in March, and the game now has 125 million players a year after launch. Fortnite has also been at the center of a cross-play controversy with Sony after the PlayStation 4 maker blocked players from accessing their Fortnite PS4 accounts on the Nintendo Switch.
Comments
I knew Tencent owns Epic Games and PUBG Mobile but had no idea that they also own a part of Bluehole. Guess all it takes to drop lawsuits is to just have a larger company make it so that they all become a part of the same family. Lol.
By Hgo S on 06.27.18 7:53am
Time will tell which one is the one trick pony.
By Skeith on 06.27.18 8:04am
There isn’t a game developer on the planet that wouldn’t mind being a one trick pony if that "one trick" brings in over a billion dollars in revenue.
By EnglishMike on 06.27.18 12:44pm
What does being a otp have to do with anything ? Riot games has only one game (league of legends) and it is still killing it after all these years.
By VIIIXXIX on 06.28.18 1:09am
Well looks like there’s no chicken dinner for tonight boys
By ABlackGuy on 06.27.18 9:02am
The whole idea of this lawsuit has serious implications if they were to win. Hopefully id Software, (and every company that made a shooter before Pubg) would turn around and launch a massive lawsuit against Bluehole for copying the idea of a first person shooter.
By BausFight on 06.27.18 9:53am
That wasn’t exactly why they were suing. IIRC, the real reason was they were accusing Epic of using the knowledge they gained from helping Bluehole develop PUBG (in Epic’s Unreal engine), to develop Fortnight. See here: https://youtu.be/WgJERaSrPhw?t=101
By thunderbird32 on 06.27.18 10:21am
Fair enough, but the only thing pubg brought to the table was a shrinking play zone. It’s not innovative anymore than adding double jump to a platformer is. Hardly trade secrets.
By BausFight on 06.27.18 11:28am
Shrinking play zones aren’t exactly new either. Minecraft has a number of mods that do just that going back four years. Not sure if any of them were combined with any of the battle royale mods that became popular after The Hunger Games came out, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
By EnglishMike on 06.27.18 12:56pm
Except the guy that makes PUBG kinda made H1Z1 King of the Kill under contract with Sony, and before that made the Battle Royale Arma Mod in Arma 2 and later 3 – still running the servers to this day. He invented the game mode. And no, Hunger Games Minecraft – which predates the Arma 2 mod by like a month – is not a battle royale.
By BulletTooth_Tony on 06.27.18 11:16pm
People always being up the Doom analogy, but it’s not really the same here.
By ASEdouard on 06.27.18 10:24am
I’d like to know your reasoning (seriously, I’m not being flippant).
By BausFight on 06.27.18 11:28am
Because a) PUBG isn’t an FPS, that’s a mode that was an add-on.
b) it isn’t about Fortnite being a shooter
c) it’s because Bluehole licensed Unreal, made massive improvements to how it handles large maps and a massive player count and telemetry, asked for help in incorporating it into the Unreal code, and then suddenly Epic had a battle royale game too tacked onto another game they wanted to gain traction on.
By BulletTooth_Tony on 06.27.18 11:20pm
So do you think a game mode, say like team deathmatch, should be copyrighted so no one else can ever make a game with team deathmatch?
By BausFight on 06.28.18 8:29am
I think the game mode is here to stay amongst other game modes. But now we need to boil it down to 2 games that are only this – and what one invested into a licensed product that was never developed with this scale and purpose in mind – and then the owner of that product taking those changes and immediately releasing a game using it. It’s a question of who owns that code on top of the base level, not on the mode itself which could be deployed in other game engines and using other techniques.
Divorce battle royale from this discussion. Rare also licensed Unreal for Sea of Thieves – and the most striking feature of that game is the water and it’s physics. If suddenly Epic released Fortnite: Aquatic Combat with those water physics, does Rare have a beef or no? That’s what is at question here – who controls the customizations done beyond the base code of what came with the license.
By BulletTooth_Tony on 06.28.18 8:48am
Unreal Engine EULA has a section "9. Feedback and Contributions", and first two sentences from it are:
So they can do whatever they like with your contributions
By Artur Czajka on 09.06.18 5:43am
To add on (over 90 seconds)… I honestly think the lawsuit was to get better licensing terms for the Unreal engine in lieu of cash to be quite honest. Epic’s improvements to the engine benefit them as well. So as not to be as blunt on your question, just was trying to be quick.
By BulletTooth_Tony on 06.27.18 11:24pm
Battled to a draw, eh? Ironic.
By youguyswannayahoo on 06.27.18 11:20am
Where is PUBG on PS4? They are just handicapping themselves.
By TechGoneCrazy on 06.27.18 12:09pm
Sony couldn’t figure out a way to market it as superior on the PS4 so they just gave up having it on their platform I guess…#fortheplayers
By Rylo Ken on 06.27.18 1:23pm