Earlier this week, tensions rose over Fortnite’s announcement of a new Battle Royale mode coming to their title. The developers of Fortnite have had a strong professional relationship with Bluehole, the team behind the infamous Battle Royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), in the past. With the new mode announced, fans weren’t the only ones to notice similarities, and Bluehole quickly released a statement of objection to the way Epic Games handled their marketing of the Fortnite title and its new mode.
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In the original statement, vice president of Bluehole had this to say:
“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.”
The vice president then went on to discuss the previous professional relationship between Bluehole and Epic games, citing “an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG‘s development as they are the creators of [Unreal Engine 4], the engine we licensed for the game.”
When the public criticism went live, players and professionals in the industry immediately rose to choose a side and many felt it was unfair of the PUBG crew to claim ownership of a genre that has been around for quite a while.
Both titles now have the option of a 100-player Battle Royale game mode; and with Fortite specifically citing the success of PlayerUnknown in their marketing materials, eyebrows were raised. After the backlash of the initial announcement however, Bluehole recently reached out to PCGamer to clarify their original objection and dive into the meat of their intent behind the original response.
In the statement, C.H Kim and his translator Sammie Kang had this to say:
“So the first thing that I’d like to clarify is that this is not about the battle royale game mode itself. There were other BR gamemodes 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].”
When the interviewer then asked for clarification that it wasn’t the mode that the company had an issue with and what specific complaints that had concerning Fortnite‘s gameplay, Kim responded:
“There are a lot of different issues but everyone else that released a battle royale game mode made their own thing, but it was Epic Games that made this game that is similar to us that has similar elements, and that’s the concern, that it was Epic Games.
We use Unreal Engine to develop PUBG, and we pay a large amount of royalties based on the size of our success to Epic Games, and Epic Games always promoted their licensing models [saying] “We want to support the success indie developers”, and [Bluehole is] this indie developer that has been the most successful one using the Unreal Engine this year, and that’s the problem that I see.”
“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. 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. We could be the biggest indie success story that they have and there will be other indie developers that aspire to succeed like us using Unreal Engine, and they would be concerned, right? So we just wanted to raise an issue and let people know that it can be a problem.”
Kim later went on to say that they wished that Epic Games would have come to them first, due to the close nature that they worked with them for support during the 100-player gaming sessions in PUBG. Bluehole felt that in going to Epic Games for support, the replication for success was laid out and that spawned a fear to continue a professional relationship with them regarding any new features or improvements made to PUBG.
The next step, according to Kim, is to start an official discussion between Epic and Bluehole:
“So, we just want to emphasize this 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.”
It is definitely interesting to see the different takes on this debate. No one game can claim a genre for its own, and a Battle Royale mode is nothing new to the gaming world; but the use of their name specifically when looking at the close working relationship between the two companies does shed at least a little light on the knee-jerk reaction from Bluehole. What are your thoughts? Do you think the PUBG is in the right?
