ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

PUBG Corp is suing Epic over Fortnite Battle Royale

PUBG Corp is suing Epic over Fortnite Battle Royale

The developer behind Playerunknown's Battlegrounds PUBG Corp has filed a lawsuit against Fortnite maker Epic Games.

The Korea Times reports that the Bluehole-owned firm filed an injunction citing alleged copyright infringement against Epic Games in January.

This isn't the first time that Epic and PUBG Corp have butted heads; the latter released a statement last September detailing its issues with the former's use of battle royale in Fortnite.

This seemed to be down to the fact that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds was built on Epic's Unreal Engine 4, with PUBG Corp implying that the middleware firm also developing its own battle royale game constituted a conflict of interest.

PUBG Corp hasn't been afraid to go legal with other giant companies, also. The studio has also tried to sue Chinese games firm NetEase over its own battle royale games, Rules of Survival and Knives Out.

In the past, creative director Brendan Greene has argued in favour of better protections against 'copycat' projects

Perhaps anticipating this wave of bad press, PUBG Corp posted an update on its Steam page, admitting that it has "fallen short" with its development on the project.

"Ever since we launched the 1.0 version of PUBG earlier this year, we’ve been focused on building our team so we can invest in the game’s ongoing development," the studio wrote.

"We’ve been building new content (like Sanhok), quality-of-life improvements (like map selection and weapon balance), and a whole series of aggressive anti-cheat measures. We want PUBG to be the best game possible so players like you keep loving—and playing—it.

Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways. Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game. Today we want to change that by talking in-depth about the things we’re prioritizing. We’ll also tease some of upcoming content we plan to add to the game."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.