The developers behind Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds has filed a lawsuit against Fornite’s developers. The PUBG developers allege copyright violation on Epic Games’ part. Epic Games released Fortnite‘s free-to-play Battle Royale mode in September last year after the game’s vanilla PvE ‘Free The World’ mode struggled to gain traction. PUBG publisher Bluehole weighed in on the similarities between the modes in September.
Bad History
Bluehole VP and executive producer Chang Han Kim said at the time:
“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. 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.”
According to Korea Times, the lawsuit was filed in January. However, details are only coming to light now. A Bluehole representative has said that there were a number of issues at hand. Most notably, Bluehole has to pay royalties to Epic games.
Royalties
The representative said:
“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.”
However, Epic Games are supposed to have used PUBG‘s name without their knowledge. Furthermore, permission wasn’t granted to use the Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds name. Because of that, the developers were surprised to see the name used.
Not much else is known about the case. However, we’ll keep you updated when we can. So far, a date for the case hasn’t been set.
Source: Korea Times.