PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer Bluehole’s issues about Epic Games copying the sport’s battle royale formulation weren’t effectively defined within the press launch despatched on Friday.
The launch made it sound like Bluehole is not happy about Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode copying main components from PUBG, however the challenge seems to be greater than that.
Bluehole VP and government producer Changhan Kim clarified the corporate’s place in an interview with PCGamer, saying that Bluehole isn’t going after different builders making their very own variations of battle royale.
“So the first thing that I’d like to clarify is that this is not about the battle royale game mode itself,” stated Changhan Kim.
“There were other BR game modes earlier this year that were released, like last man standing or GTA 5’s battle royale game mode, and we never raised an issue, and I think it’s great that there’s more competition and everyone should be able to create their own battle royale game mode, and it’s not about the idea itself, it’s about Epic Games, and that wasn’t really clear [in the press release].”
The challenge of the copycat being Epic Games – the corporate that makes the engine PUBG is predicated on – seems to be the primary level right here. According to Changhan Kim, this wouldn’t be a difficulty if it had been another developer.
“So, battle royale is just about last man standing, it’s a simple game mode, and we’re not claiming any kind of ownership over the game mode or genre itself, it’s not for us to even comment,” he defined.
“There were a lot of copycats in China and [in that] industry there is a lot of battle royale games that look exactly [the] same as ours, so we will definitely look into similarities if there are different products that are very similar to our game, but even before we actually looked deeper into how similar [Fortnite Battle Royale] is, we wanted to raise an issue because this is from Epic Games.”
Kim identified that different video games that used Brendan Greene’s concepts for battle royale truly had a license to take action, citing King of the Kill and PUBG itself as each following this rule. Epic Games has clearly not carried out this.
But there’s one other challenge that’s probably on the coronary heart of this battle: Bluehole’s concern that Epic may very well be making engine enhancements that profit Fortnite which gained’t be shared with the PUBG crew. Seeing as the 2 firms are actually competitions, this may very well be an issue.
“We’re going to get some technical support [from Epic], and we’re going to work with them to make sure Unreal Engine better supports battle royale gameplay which requires 100 people in one session, and now we’re starting to have concerns that they’re going to develop new features or improve something in the engine to support that battle royale gameplay, and then use it for their own game mode,” the manager elaborated.
The different facet of that is that any enhancements made by Bluehole internally to Unreal Engine four might leak out, benefiting different studios. Bluehole can be not pleased with Fortnite utilizing the PUBG title in promo materials, with Epic builders citing PUBG as inspiration for Fortnite’s mode.
“It was in their promotional video that was posted on Twitter and they would openly mention that they were fans of PUBG, we wanted to make this battle royale game mode, and that kind of gave the impression that we were officially involved in this,” he added. “[Sic] there were players like, ‘Oh it’s cool, now we get to play PUBG in Fortnite’, and there was nothing we could do about it, because it was depicted that we were officially involved.”
Bluehole has reached out to Epic Korean, which in flip has contacted the US headquarters, however no contact was made between Epic and Bluehole straight after the press launch was despatched – seeing because it was the weekend.
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