PUBG Corp, the subsidiary of Bluehole Inc and publisher of cult video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, has dropped its lawsuit against Fortnite publisher, Epic Games. The lawsuit was filed last January in South Korea over allegations that certain aspects of Fortnite’s gameplay were infringing upon PUBG’s intellectual property (IP) rights.
According to Bloomberg, PUBG Corp has confirmed the withdrawal of the lawsuit, but there’s no word on why and how the sudden change came about. There’s also no word on whether the two parties have reached an out-of-court settlement.
It’s worth noting here that both PUB Corp and Epic Games have many shared interests, including the fact that Chinese tech giant Tencent is a stakeholder in both companies. Furthermore, PUBG is actually built using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, so it’s not immediately clear how that relationship is likely to be affected by this legal skirmish.
Meanwhile, PUBG Corp’s lawsuit against Netease over ‘Knives Out’ and ‘Rules of Survival’ is still ongoing and isn’t likely to be withdrawn anytime soon, given how similar they are to PUBG both in terms of their settings as well as their realistic graphics, which is drastically different from the cartoonish look and feel of Fortnite.
Since its release, Fortnite: Battle Royale has gone on to become the biggest battle royale game in the world beating PUBG, even though the latter was the one that actually brought back the genre into the limelight.
While PUBG was not the first battle royale game to have hit the scene, it definitely paved the way for the massive success of Fortnite, and is one of the major reasons why game developers are rushing to add battle royale modes to their popular titles.
