Yesterday PUBG Corp did something very dumb, they sued Epic Games for copyright infringement. While I get why they are angry, PUBG pays Epic to license their engine, and then Epic turns around uses that money to create a Battle Royal variant for their game Fortnite. Which at first played very similar to PUBG. It must be hard watching a bunch of players leave to a similar game made by the people you pay to help you with your game, but this is just a bad look.
PUBG should have responded to Fortnite: Battle Royal by doubling down on making their game better. To be fair it has gotten better on both Xbox and PC, but it is still poorly optimized, and it doesn’t have the best aesthetic. Not to mention its loot system is pretty lame. Though despite all that I like PUBG more. The moment to moment tension in PUBG is better than the arcade-y thrill of Fortnite.
Which is another problem for PUBG’s lawsuit, while Fortnite started out very similar to PUBG, they are vastly different games now. I am not sure how copyright works in Korea, but they would have a hard time making people think they are the same game here in the states. Especially since the game industry is full of clones of one another, and a lot of them are far more egregious than Fortnite.
Look, it was bad form for Epic to literally say, “we like PUBG so much we are going to make our own Battle Royal game”, but suing people for bad form is not good business practice, and it makes all the gamers out there dislike PUBG for its epic case of sour grapes. If PUBG wants to get its gamers back it needs to buckle down and make its game better, not sue Epic for bogus copyright infringement. That will do the opposite.