https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2018/05/134_249598.html

Well, they really did it. Bluehole warned that they were considering legal action against other Battle Royale games last fall, and now they're suing the only competition that matters. Real classy, I'm sure it will work out well.

Legit question can Epic demand they stop using the unreal engine because that's the move I'd pull if I was Epic.

@haruko: That's a good question - could they pull an "X-Men: Destiny" and force the game off the market? We'll see.

I only quickly browsed through the r/games thread on this, but is this what sorta led up to Too Human getting pulled from shelves due to Epic counter-suing?

Not really the Too Human mess was about Silicon Knights using code without permission. The short version is Silicon Knights paid to use the at the time incomplete Unreal 3 engine. They have a bunch of trouble for whatever reason and instead of working it out like adults they claim Epic sold them an inferior not complete version of UE3. They then claim that their games Too Human and Xmen Destiny are made with their own proprietary engine. They super are not they just straight up stole a bunch of code from UE3 and didnt pay the liscensing fee. So while the Too Human mess is going on Silicon Knights sues Epic and a judge decides not only against Silicon Knights but in Epics Favor and makes Silicon pay a bunch of money and orders them to stop selling both games.

Where for the bluehole/Epic beef its more that Bluehole claims they own the concept of battle royale (which they clearly don't) and that Fortnite is infringing on their claim of owning battle royale and that they and epic worked together on the concept (last part im not clear on)

What Epic did was lame and tacky, but I'm not sure how PUBG would win in court. Epic mentioning them in their press release when they first announced their BR mode might be helpful to them. Fortnite is basically a "clout chaser" video game and is obnoxious, but I don't think they should be sued... unless there's more to the story that's not public.

This seems ill-advised but I also don't know what the standards for copyright law are like in Korea and I'd imagine they have good lawyers making these decisions so who knows.

Give me a break; what a bunch of children. They already made an obscene amount of money and their game is still massive. Don't support this behavior; don't play their game.

The differences are enough that it probably wont fly in any legit court. Plus its bad publicity as i am sure some fans enjoy both and it makes them look bitter. Unless you can copyright or trademark jumping out of a plane and 100 vs 100. Otherwise the game play is extremely different from what i have seen

They expect to win this? Unreal.

*grabs popcorn*

Claim might not be legitimate, but Bluehole could also have some legitimate grievances. I'll wait for court filings and more information about what exactly Bluehole is claiming Fortnite infringes on before passing judgment. The "partner of Bluehole" line is interesting - if Epic improperly appropriated copyrighted work while working with Bluehole then that could certainly be legitimate grounds for suit regardless of the similarity between the games.

Real hard to see a win here, in court or public opinion.

@bladeofcreation: reported.

Gonna echo the disappointed sentiment towards Bluehole. Very silly. Also, don't they lose some credibility in their point by not sueing all battle royale games at once?

I'm rooting for Bluehole. A heck of a lot more was copied from PUBG than just the concept of the battle royale.

This is stupid. At the same time, I hope they win?

Even though PUBG isn't completely original in its own right being that the movie "Battle Royale" exists, I fully support PUBG's claim against Epic. Remember that Epic is PUBG's contracted game engine provider. PUBG blows up in popularity and their own game engine provider, ostensibly there to assist with the game's development, steals/copies/borrows the battle royale style of game from one of their engine users whole cloth and uses their same engine to do it. So PUBG's business partner became their main competitor. If that's not a lawsuit I don't know what is? It doesn't mean they will WIN, but there should definitely be a lawsuit. If Epic's own original idea for a game, Fortnite Save the World, had been doing well, they wouldn't have had to copy PUBG. It was an act of desperation to salvage Fortnite Save The World, and as it turns out, a lot of people like a PUBG clone that's free on console.

It still rubs me the wrong way that from a performance/programming perspective PUBG still struggles to this day while Fortnite runs flawlessly, and Epic is now actually incentivized to NOT help them with it.

Not speaking with any grasp or knowledge of the particulars, but PUBG would not be doing this if their legal dept. (as much as that may be) didn't tell them it was doable. What the actual goal is, is also obscure to me.

This might be interesting how it ends up.

I do not understand this whole "they copied pubg" argument. I guess pubg copied H1Z1 then. Oh and Blizzard should sue the Paladins team for copying Overwatch. And any game that has team deathmatch with guns should sue each other. This is beyond silly. Aestically Fortnite looks nothing like pubg, it plays at a faster pace, has an entire building mechanic, has loot rarity, the guns shoot completely different... I mean come on. Makes them look like children upset that Fortnite is doing better than them, which it deserves to because its season pass is actually worth the money, unlike pubg's absolutely horrendous loot box system. Of all loot boxes there's are the worst.

@cjduke: The main dev of PUBG made H1Z1 too and I don't think someone can rip their ownselves off. There's really no denying that PUBG popularized the genre and Epic copied them in order to save their failing game. If PUBG didn't exist then Fortnite wouldn't have added BR and would be dead like Evolve, Brink, and other games.

Overwatch didn't invent or popularize anything. Blizzard slightly changed the TF2 formula.

I recall their original argument was that there was a conflict of interest in that Epic was consulted on the creation of tools used to create PUBG and then used that inside information to create a similar game directly competing with Bluehole's. So maybe some kind of bad faith suit against Epic?

Be interesting to see how they come at them since all the other companies they went after were done using some form of digtal asset for comparison. Gonna be hard to suggest any assets in Fortnite are infringing considering Fortnite already contained the majority of it's assets within the co-op game.

I was very angry at Epic initially, it just seemed like a bigger company crowding out the new rival.

But the games play so differently, it’s really hard to say that they are competitors. PubG is a milsim, Fortnite is an arcade shooter.

If this move was advised by legal counsel then i wish them luck, if the pubg people just got all upset and decided to make a stink, fuck em. I’ll keep enjoying PubG for now.

One way I could see PUBG having a claim is if EPIC used code specific to PUBG and not previously in Unreal. That or, maybe a breach of contract thing where EPIC promised to provide some specific support to PUBG that was not followed through on when Fortnite became popular. I seriously doubt that a case based on pure copying would be successful because of how different the two games are.

The other point in PUBG's favor is that the case was filled in South Korea, where they are based, which probably gives them a slight edge.

This seems like a real bad idea, but at the same time I feel really bad for PUBG, but at the same time Fortnite put out something more approachable (aesthetically and financially) that also sets itself apart from a gameplay perspective when PUBG was raking it in, sooooo ya know.

If the only grievance is Fortnite being too similar to PUBG, they have no leg to stand on. If that actually passes, an interesting and maybe dangerous precedent is set.

According to this PC Gamer article, it's not so much about the gameplay stuff:

In September last year, a Bluehole representative clarified with us that it wasn't Fortnite's inheritance of the Battle Royale mode that was concerning.

"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. 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.

"But our name was used to officially promote their game without our knowledge. There was no discussion. It was just a bit surprising and disappointing to see our business partner using our name officially to promote the game mode that is pretty similar to us and there was misunderstanding in the community that we're officially involved in the project."

This kind of move just seems out of pettiness than anything. They had to think that this was eventually going to happen and if this is the conclusion that they made about competition then I really don't want to support them further. If by sheer luck it all goes through, I wonder what Activision/Blizzard will have to say about this and whether they would challenge it.

Unless PUBG has another engine ready to go, I dont think that the smartest step forward.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know a ton about what happened, but I get the impression that there was definitely some bad faith and impropriety on the part of Epic Games, and I feel at least a little bad for the PUBG guy. That said, I don't think we've seen enough evidence to suggest that Bluehole has a legal case.

Here's the problem: if Epic settles with Bluehole before this goes to court, for a decent sum of money, will people interpret that as a tacit admission that Fortnite wouldn't have been a hit without copying the blueprint of PUBG? Like, that is an assumption that a lot of people already have, so this would just enforce that. Would Epic be so willing to avoid that that they'd let a court decide things.

Both sides can afford good legal representation, that's for sure.

@fram: That seems a lot more rational, although I still think they're going to lose. Seperating the whole engine/buisness partners thing, mentioning them in promotional material is a bit off but at the same time it's not like Bungie tried to sue every mediocre game that claimed to be a Halo killer. I agree with most of the people in this thread, this is some petty bullshit.

Isn't PUBG made with the Unreal Engine? I believe that was part of their unhappiness with Fortnite. Honestly I feel going against Epic here could do them more harm then good, what's stopping Epic Games dropping all engine support to PUBG, unless they already have a new game engine ready. Maybe I'm wrong on that.

Feels desperate to me, played both but would always choose FortniteBR over PUBG these days. Just for the fact that it's a quicker, better looking and a more enjoyable game. Though I play the Save the World mode more than BR.

Oh so tencent is sueing tencent ?

News flash id sues unreal for making DOOM clones.

@boozak: The key part of that quote for me is "there was misunderstanding in the community that we're officially involved in the project." A company claiming that its game is a "Halo killer" is not really a comparable situation.

Yeah I didn't think of that - did anyone clear this with Tencent before this went down?

Alright - you said something important that needs to stop being said.

There is no "PUBG" guy. PUBG is a game owned by Bluehole - who are a massive developer of MMO games in Korea. Brendan Greene (PlayerUnknown) is not a bedroom developer sitting in his parents home in the countryside of Ireland who has a grievance with Epic Games. He's part of a team of developers who work for a big corporation. He was brought into Bluehole because they had money and wanted to use his "brand" to promote the game. And it worked. And they made billions off of it. And now they're in the business of suing developers who are making similar games.

While obviously budgets are allocated for different reasons - perhaps Bluehole and PUBG Corp could take some of the money they're spending on these lawsuits and try keep up with the competition.

This is one big corporation suing another big corporation.

@deckard: I don't think Tencent is a majority shareholder in Epic (40 %) and the pubgcorp or bluehole. But yeah i don't think these Chinese Government aka Tencent approves this move. Big lawsuits tend to have a negative influence on stock in the short term.

@deathstriker: So should Valve sue Blizzard for copying and then slightly tweaking the TF 2 formula? Fortnite plays nothing like pubg at all. There has been and will be a million more "pubg" clones because its a popular genre right now. More games copy each other than create something new.

Also saying Fortnite would be a dead game if they didn't copy pubg is probably true, but they also made a game that runs better, has higher framerate, less bugs, and less hackers. Bluehole or "PUBG Corp." can't even patch their game without breaking something. Fortnite also has an amazing free to play model and the building mechanic and faster pace makes the game completely different to play than PUBG.

I don't particularly like Fortnite at all. I have 375 hours in pubg and about 25 in fortnite. But all this "sue fortnite they are copycats" just comes across as this lame PUBG vs Fortnite internet war like the stupid console wars in the 90s and 2000s.

Unless some crazy shit gets revealed, Epic comes out of this looking like the good guy for sure. Epic got out ahead of this on day one when they admitted where their inspiration came from. Thing is, Fortnite caught PUBG slippin. Came out better optimized for a wider range of PCs, came out on consoles before PUBG which is still only available on XB1, shut down their cheater problem almost instantly while PUBG took/is taking forever, and seems to listen and implement community feedback infinitely faster. Also, and most importantly, Fortnite has it's own unique style and mechanics that appeal to a much broader audience.

So again, even if PUBG wins the suit, Fortnite comes out on top in the court of public opinion pretty much no matter what. As for what the actual courts would think, ehh...I haven't a clue, but I agree with most people that it doesn't seem like Bluehole stands a chance. Bluehole claims "Fortnite copies the in-game interface and items in its own game" which I can only respond to with...huh? Obviously, it's not literally 1:1 and I don't think Bluehole is saying it is either, but still, it doesn't even seem close enough other than for positioning being vaguely the same.

It certainly seems like a weird and desperate move, but I'm not a lawyer sooo maybe there is actually a legitimate case here Bluehole can win? Fuck if I know. It just seems like they're sour about second place to me.

Of course Fortnite is riding on the popoularity of PUBG, but let's not pretend PUBG is original. There were other battle royale games before that (The Culling, arguably survival games like H1Z1 and DayZ). Not to mention the royale concept is long before gaming. Fortnite is riding on PUBGs popularity the same way PUBG is on these other survival/royale games, just maybe a bit closer to the line.

@cjduke: I said in my first post that I disagreed with taking Epic to court... if things are as simple as it seems. I just find it hard to root for Fortnite since it is a copycat and the game (the way it's covered by the media and a lot of its fans) are obnoxious. We don't know the details here. PUBG could be suing over stolen code, Epic not supporting them like their contract said, or something else. I doubt Bluehole wants to waste millions over a dumb lawsuit.

@wandrecanada: Yeah, as a layman, and with all the clout such status carries, I’d have to assume the only way they have a case is if Epic misused information it obtained as part of their partnership with Bluepoint in order to make a competing product.

I have no idea what those sorts of agreements look like, but I’d wager Epic would want to tread carefully for fear of folks using one of the many alternative cheap, capable, and portable engines available these days.

Every game, every movie, every book is a copy of something if you look hard enough. What a waste of time and money.

Riddick-ilous! Lame-O! Pretty much agree with everything Jeff said on the podcast, this is just super stupid on so many levels. Shame on you, Bluehole.

I'm 100% rooting for PUBG in this for the following reasons:

• Fortnite was failing hard until they ripped off PUBG. If Fortnite was successful on its own merit prior to hopping on the Battle Royale bandwagon, I wouldn't have an issue with this. Except it was tanking, so they decided to pivot and just copied a popular product, which is pretty fucking weak.
  
  
• Fortnite intentionally undercut PUBG on price and shoved their version out before the PUBG console launch. This strategy has proven wildly successful, but also serves as proof that Fortnite actively avoided trying to best PUBG on their product's actual quality, which speaks for itself. Fortnite's appeal was/is almost entirely that it's "free PUBG".
  
  
• Fortnite actively used PUBGs name without consent to help push their product. This is what may well cost them big in the suit, and arguably should. Any argument about what is/isn't "original" to PUBG (since apparently Greene "copied" uh....himself) is somewhat irrelevant when Fortnite themselves openly cited PUBG to try and inflate their own product, against PUBGs wishes.

This is the opposite of competition. Unchecked, it will lead to every good game instantly having some shitty F2P clone, and that is fucking terrible for the industry. Fortnite's success has made it clear that a bunch of gamers fucking LOVE the idea of getting something for nothing, which as a concept is ridiculously untenable on the whole and not how any other industry works. The awful message that sends to developers is that "hey, even if you make a great thing, we're going with the cheap/free facsimile of it instead, at which point we'll happily throw them our money on dumbass loot crate shit that should have gone to support your game." The failings there should be crystal goddamn clear, as should the rationale for hoping PUBG wins this.

@notnert427: crazy to me that you're legitimately ok with a legal precedent being set that it's not okay to copy game mechanics. PUBG itself copied other games. Who fucking cares if Fortnite was failing before adding a battle royale mode? PUBG doesn't have a monopoly on battle royale, and it would be ridiculous if they legally did.

uh- isn't this kinda already the case? at least with the iOS/android space- no good idea goes uncopied.

I'm far more concerned with a precedent being set by Fortnite's success that it is okay to blatantly copy other games. The games PUBG supposedly "copied" are either Greene's own work in the genre (which dates back a long-ass time) or non-starters like The Culling that, if anything, served as evidence that the market didn't want a BR game until PUBG got it right and proved that it did, at which point Fortnite shows up and happily bandwagons literally on PUBGs name to prop up their shitty game.

Moreover, no outcome of this is "PUBG legally owns the BR genre forever"; that's a fucking ridiculous strawman and not at all the contention I'm making or what I'm hoping for. However, it is readily apparent (and admitted) that Fortnite piggybacked on PUBG, and yeah, they should probably answer for that shit.

A couple of points here. One is that, as you recognize, there were other games in the genre before PUBG. H1Z1 was successful until PUBG "blatantly copied" their game. If anything, Daybreak would have more of a case against Bluehole, because they literally hired the same designer to make their game. The other point is that Fortnite is not the first example of games becoming successful by "blatantly copying" another game. That precedent was set many years ago. Minecraft for example, was another take on the same kind of game as Infiniminer. Notch even cited that game directly as his inspiration. Does that mean that Mojang owes another company a bunch of money because Minecraft was more successful?

There's a couple of things wrong with what you've said here.

"This strategy has proven wildly successful, but also serves as proof that Fortnite actively avoided trying to best PUBG on their product's actual quality, which speaks for itself."

Fortnite has always been a better running and arguably better looking game than PUBG has ever been. Putting artistic tastes aside, Fortnite runs smoothly across all platforms, has had very little issues with hackers, very little issues with connectivity and whenever bugs do pop up EPIC are quick to fix them.

"Fortnite's appeal was/is almost entirely that it's "free PUBG"."

And the twist on building, and how it controls differently, and how it's a faster more colorful game. And how it's not a pallet swap at all. If it was a pallet swap, this would have more merit.

"This is the opposite of competition."

It's absolutely competition in every sense of the word.

"hey, even if you make a great thing, we're going with the cheap/free facsimile of it instead, at which point we'll happily throw them our money on dumbass loot crate shit that should have gone to support your game.""

Remind me again - which game is it that has loot crates in it? It's not Fortnite anyway. It's actually PUBG - the game that costs $30 and went all in on the Steam market place, loot boxes and keys to open those loot boxes.

Enjoy what happens to the industry if PUBG Corp actually win this case and there's immediately a precedent set for being able to sue based on similarities like gameplay mechanics.

As others have said - Daybreak should be the ones who are pissed. It's highly unlikely that Greene wouldn't have signed an agreement with them that whatever he helped develop was their own work and couldn't be brought with him. Daybreaks biggest problem was they probably didn't get him to sign a no-compete clause, which allowed the guys at Bluehole to hire him help to make PUBG for them and allowed Bluehole to slap his name on it.