Brendan Greene, the creative director of battle royale blockbuster Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has said that video games need to be better protected from copycats.

Speaking to BBC Newsbeat, the game maker says that developer should put their own spin on a game type rather than straight-up lifting things from his game.

"I want this genre of games to grow," he said. "For that to happen you need new and interesting spins on the game mode. "If it's just copycats down the line, then the genre doesn't grow and people get bored."

He continued: "There's no intellectual property protection in games. "In movies and music there is IP protection and you can really look after your work. In gaming that doesn't exist yet, and it's something that should be looked into.

"Some amazing games pass under the radar. "Then someone else takes the idea, has a marketing budget, and suddenly has a popular game because they ripped off someone else's idea. I think it's something the industry needs to look into. "You're protecting the work of artists basically. Games are art for a large part, and so I think it's important they're protected."

This echoes comments he made to PCGamesInsider.biz last month when asked if he feels any ownership over the burgeoning battle royale genre with companies like Epic, Rockstar and Crytek entering the fray with their version of battle royale. 

"I feel some ownership over some gameplay mechanics that were unique to the mods I made; they didn't come from the movies," he told us at the time.

"Jumping out of a plane, the blue zone... that's not from a movie. These are concepts I came up with. I don't really feel ownership, I just hope that anyone wanting to do it puts a unique spin on it."

The game has now also sold more than 24m copies on PC, as per an announcement on Xbox Wire promoting the Xbox One version. For those keeping count, that's still more than four million copies in the last three weeks.