Epic Games/PUBG
PUBG and Fortnite are arguably the biggest video games on the planet right now and it is mostly to do with their massive battle royale format. The publisher of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is now suing Epic Games and claiming they stole their idea for the free-for-all gameplay found in Fortnite‘s Battle Royale mode from PUBG.
Korean game developer PUBG Corp., the studio behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games in January with the Seoul Central District Court. The lawsuit was brought “to determine whether the latter’s Fortnite was copied from the former’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds according to a report from The Korea Times.
PUBG Corp. and Epic Games both used the same gaming engine. “We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG’s development as they are the creators of UE4, the engine we licensed for the game,” Bluehole vice president Chang Han Kim said in a press release. “After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.
“We just want to emphasize this is only a problem because Epic Games is the company that makes the engine we use and we pay a large amount of royalties to them,” a Bluehole representative told PC Gamer last September. “And we had this business relationship and we had trust that we would be getting continued support, and we were looking forward to working more closely with them to get technical support, maybe develop new features.”
There was no timeline when court proceedings will commence.
[IGN]