In the past two years the types of games people are playing has changed drastically. For years players had choices between RPG, FPS, Puzzle, and more, but there has been a new genre of gaming that has emerged recently and it is Battle Royale. This new game genre has taken the gaming community by storm. What makes this genre different from others is that it is solely online and it is all a fight to the death. This game genre can be compared to the Hunger Games, but instead of 24 people its 100. The genre is very popular at the moment and many major games are starting to include a battle royal mode in their games, some games include, Call of Duty and Tetris. But everything starts somewhere.
The first game to introduce Battle Royale was Player Unknown's Battleground. The premise of the game would be that you would drop out of a plane with 99 other players and try to be the last alive while at the same time trying to get as many kills as possible. When the game released in March of 2017 it blew up on the charts being the #1 most played game for months, but that was until a new competitor came to town.
PUBG's new competitor was a game called Fortnite. Though the game released back in 2011 it did not add its battle royale mode until June of 2017. When the battle royale mode released it did not make too much traction in the gaming community until the fall of 2017, but when it did it was rising fast.
Fortnite made a major impact on the gaming community and the genre of battle royale for one sole reason, that PUBG did not have, the game is free. Because the game was free it was able to bring in more players and was also playable on all systems. The game quickly gained traction and was bringing in millions of dollars daily.
PUBG did not like what they were seeing and quickly filed a law suit for copyright infringement. PUBG claims that Fortnite stole the its user interface and game items.
Both games generate millions of dollars and should have no problem with each other but PUBG wants to protect their copyright on the game. When looking into both of the games it gets a little fishy because PUBG was created in Unreal Engine, a game developing software, created by Epic Games, creators of Fortnite. Then on top of that both PUBG and Fortnite both share a major investor by the name of Tencent Holdings.
Not too long after the case was filed PUBG pulled out of the case without disclosing any reason to why doing so. If the case kept moving forward it would be hard to say who would win the case or whether a judge would just drop the case, but if it moved forward it could jeopardize how the entire gaming industry has been running. Developers could have ended up suing each other based of the types of games they released and ones that are oddly similar to them. For example if this case followed through and PUBG won the case, Blizzard could sue Hi-Rez Studios because Hi-Rez Studios' game Paladins is almost identical to Blizzard's Overwatch. To say whether who would have won this case might never be known. Both PUBG and Fortnite are living side by side in the gaming community with Fortnite dominating the market.
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