News PUBG sues Epic over Fortnite similarities

So you make a fortune by releasing a game while still in beta and flogging it for lots of money, your competition brings out a competing game, do you either:
(a) fix all the bugs, add new content, make your game better so people keep playing it or
(b) try even harder to make money by releasing alpha quality versions of the game on the consoles at AAA prices while ignoring all the bugs in the existing game that you promised to fix, and then sue your competitors out of existence.

I'm British, I'd normally go for the underdog, but in this case I hope BlueHole loose horribly.

 

How dim can you be to sue the people who you licensed the engine from, even in the highly unlike case they win Epic could probably shaft them by revoking the license or tie them up in the courts for years with constant allegations of licensing breaches.

If the bugs, performance issues, cheating, and obvious money grabbing wasn't enough to kill PUBG this lawsuit defiantly is.

 

- Take standard non-team deathmatch mode.
- Set respawn limit to 0.
- Set play count to max.
- Set map size to max.

Whoops, I accidentally created the Battle Royale genre!

 

This sounds like a surefire way to burn bridges with a business partner. I hope BlueHole/The PUBG Corp. loses this fight horribly, because this is just being ridiculous and greedy. You can't/shouldn't be able own an entire concept around which a game is built, else the entire gaming industry would grind to a halt.

 

Epic is the underdog.

They came to the market with an unfancied pretender to the massive entrenched franchise, they've beaten it by making a good game and actually put time, effort and money into treating customers well. Whilst the market leader coasted along making money off the back of organised hacking and calling anyone who complained xenophobic, then wondered why it's sales tanked.

I can see Tencent putting the kibosh on this. They partially own Epic, they're funding PUBG mobile and I'm sure they have no desire to see one of their investments litigating against another that it relies upon to continue trading.

Or we're about to see another Too Human situation unfold.

 

Indeed, neither single life deathmatch nor high player count mp are new, BF2 for example had up to 64 player mp over a decade ago.

 

Epic is a huge company that's been around for 20 years and who's engines have probably powered more games then any other. BlueHole is the indy dev that against all the odd made it to the big time. It's nice to see the little guys make it, unfortunately it turns out BlueHole is run by a bunch of money grabbing a$$holes.

 

Where, what, who?

Since when have game ideas been subject to copyright? The entire game industry is built on copying others work with a few tweaks. I mean, that makes nearly all the mobile games illegal, as they are all blatant rip-offs of each other.

If they had stolen code or assets, they would have a point, but you can't steal a game mode. Especially one which is just Arena Deathmatch, a mode that has been around a while. Calling it Battle Royal does not change the game type from arena dm.

 

IIRC some people suugested PUBG implement region locking [specifically china] as a solution to some of the game's issues and greene dismissed the idea and called those who suggested it xenophobic.

 

PUBG keys are sold en masse to cyber cafes in China, which in of itself is not uncommon.

What's a lot weirder are the over the counter hack packages you can buy with them. Obviously these aren't official, but they allow the grind to be mostly automated, which equates to mass unlocks of items for trading, real money trading which PUBG corp takes a percentage of.

Needless to say the Chinese took it to industrial levels more or less the moment PUBG was released, at the expense of everyone playing the game for fun. With the vast majority of bots and hackers originating in China it's been suggested that applying a region lock would improve the experience for the rest of the world.

Brendand Greene's response was “This kind of xenophobic attitude that a lot of Western players seem to have online is just disgraceful. It's 2017! We live on one big planet together! What the ****? I'm quite ashamed of those players that shout these things out. We want to create a great space for everyone to enjoy across the globe and locking one region out ... I don't know what the **** they’re thinking.”

With item trading being disabled a month ago it looks like they might have got the message, when it was kicked into their heads by all those players walking out of the door.

 

Unfortunately that only disabled the black market, steam marketplace still exists

Worst thing is that they didn't see it coming, MMORPGs have been dealing with chinese gold farmers for years, yet somehow the PubeG devs supposedly couldn't predict that the ability to trade / sell items between players would inevitably result in farming and hacking.