A Battle Royale Battle: Fortnite Being Sued by PUBG

This one’s gonna be big. PUBG’s (short for Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds) parent company PUBG Corporation has filed suit against Epic Games. Epic, who creates and operates Fortnite, is accused of copyright infringement. The stakes here are pretty astronomical, so this is going to be a rather high-profile case. 

High Profile? It’s Just Some Video Game Companies, Right? 

Fortnite sported a record-breaking 3.4 million players online at one time in February of this year. The previous record? 3.3 million players, held by PUBG. Both games represent upwards of a billion dollars in revenue for their parent companies.  

Those mind-boggling numbers are further augmented by the tremendous success of streamers, gamers who air their gameplay for entertainment. Both PUBG and Fortnite streamers can pull in thousands upon thousands of viewers while playing the battle royale games.If judges agree to look at the Korean company’s suit, it could be on the same scale as the recent Samsung and Apple case. Ironically, that case featured an American company suing a Korean one over patent claims. 

Complications for the Suit 

This case will be an odd one. For one thing, while PUBG went live before Fortnite in March of 2017, Fortnite is much older. It entered development seven years ago, in 2011, as a zombie survival game. However, after being released in July of 2017, Fortnite wasn’t performing as well as Epic had hoped. To bolster the player numbers, they introduced a free-to-play battle royale mode that proved immensely popular. 

What’s more, Epic games created the Unreal Engine, the game engine PUBG runs in. This isn’t contentious in and of itself and is quite typical of the gaming industry. It is, however, an interesting wrinkle.  

PUBG’s Claims 

It does seem, however, that the plaintiff has some valid points. Both games feature a large map where 100 players are dropped from an airplane. Those players then scavenge for weapons and attempt to remain alive until they are the last man standing. They have somewhat similar user interfaces, although PUBG tries to appear quite realistic. Fortnite, by contrast, is cartoony and whimsical.  

The only problem? Battle royale, as a genre, might not be an easy copyright to defend. To wit, PUBG itself is clearly based entirely on Koushun Takami’s 1999 dystopian novel Battle Royale. Takami’s novel quite literally lays the groundwork for the moment-to-moment gameplay of PUBG, down to the random locations of weapons and the ever-shrinking battleground. Any serious attempts by PUBG Corporation to defend their game as a wholly original work are thus a bit humorous.  

Takami, for his part, has been rather influential in pop culture. The Hunger Games series, for instance, also bore striking resemblances to his novel. Takami himself was rather gracious about the other series’ success, stating “every novel has something to offer.” This leads one to believe he would have a similar attitude with regards to the battle royale video game craze. However, the point still stands: PUBG Corporation accusing someone else of copyright infringement is a bit ironic.