'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' Dev Isn't Happy About 'Fornite: Battle Royale'

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ibjeepr

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HELLO and welcome to Shark Tank!

Shark 1: How many patents do you have.
Dev: None.
Shark 1: So any larger business can simply duplicate your success?
Dev: No, we're special (listing irrelevant ways they think they're safe)
Shark 1: I'm out; but welcome to the game industry.
 

travis.eno

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In all honesty its just a better version of PUBG. In literally every way. It lacks features (For the moment) but the core of the game is much more solid and E-sports ready.
 
It's one thing for a dev to copy another dev, but to copy your own customer's success? I couldn't personally go that route, but they can and will obviously do whatever they want.

In the end, they can simply say their Fortnite customers demanded a Battle Royale mode and so they provided, simple as that I guess.

Edit: Imagine the scenario where you're designing a game with the UE and you're contacting Epic, sharing your ideas, because you need their technical expertise to get the engine to do what you need it to, or you simply encounter bugs in the engine that inevitably lead to some sharing of ideas or concepts during the reporting process, and down the road, there's your game mode in one of their titles. I'm not suggesting that's the case here, but that has to be in the back of the minds of anyone considering using it from here on out. It'd be like a swift kick to the chest that sends you through plate glass.
 

dstarr3

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They should be thrilled others are trying to ape their success. Besides, PUBG already has 10,000,000 copies sold, it's not like there's going to be a mass refunding because someone else is doing the same thing.

If they want to secure future potential customers, assuming there's even anyone left to buy the game, they just need to make their game better than the alternatives. Are they afraid they can't do that or something? And if they are afraid of that, why would they broadcast that insecurity? It's not going to make anyone want their game more.
 

travis.eno

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I think if PUBG had created the "Battle Royal" Genre they would have grounds to be upset. But they didn't. Look at all the successful DOTA clones. LoL Is still the most popular game in the world, and it was nothing more than a more polished version of the WC3 mod. And continues to be one of the most polished versions of the genre. I think competition is good for any genre of video game. More options for the players. More motivation to innovate and improve the product. In the end, the consumer is winning here.
 

neilquan

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TRAVIS.ENO, you're exactly right. PUBG did not invent the Battle Royale game mode. Imagine if only the first game who introduced capture the flag or rescue/escort could stop others from ever using that mode. Many of the best games would have never existed. It's silly.
UE is ubiquitous at this point. (How do you like my word of the day?). It's hard to find a shooter that doesn't use it. Even had they created their own physics engine (no small task), someone else would have eventually introduce BR mode. So I think PUBG's argument is really worthless.
 

bigdragon

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Bluehole should get used to this. We saw all manner of DOTA clones trying to ride off of their success. Open world went absolutely nuts after GTA3 made a ton of cash off of it. Everyone wanted to make an RTS game after Warcraft came out. Now we've moved on to hero shooters thanks to Overwatch. Next, it's battle royale games -- there will be a ton of them in the next year or two.

This is how the gaming industry works. This sort of competition and innovation is awesome. It's the reason we have games like Cities Skylines, Just Cause, Halo, and even PUBG itself. "Anything you can do I can do better," is healthy for this industry. I don't want to see the gaming industry turn into some nightmarish offshoot of the mobile software industry where everyone is constantly suing everyone else.
 
I think PUBG is a currently good game. But, like every game out there, it will slowly die. They need to perform -in a future- fast start games with 30~50~70~100 people on the server.
 

Ben Pottinger

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PuBG is a fun game and worth the 25$ I spent on it but like all MP games without player controlled servers it has a shelf life. If you want to maintain total control and eventually sell micro transactions, etc then do what their doing. If you want people to be playing your game 20 years from now, publish a server client. (And the games high player count isn't an issue, plenty of us have the bandwidth and hardware to run a 100+ player capable server).
 

DerekA_C

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Good, maybe they will fix the inconsistent performance in the game for all users. Particularly those who have a 1080ti, specially those with a 1080p monitor that want to achieve 144fps at medium settings at least, but yet they get worse performance than a 1070.
 

straykat627

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I haven't played, but I'm not sure what's original about "battle royale". Wasn't Battlefield doing something similar years ago?
 


The difference is mainly that this is a free-for-all mode where you have 100 players and perma-death, where everyone is trying to be the last man standing, or the last team of two to four players, depending on match settings. The battle starts out across a large island with players gathering gear, much like a survival game along the lines of DayZ, but the active area shrinks substantially every few minutes, with an encroaching kill-wall eventually narrowing the playfield down to a random close-quarters area of the map. Because of this, matches are only about a half-hour in length, and players have to keep moving, and can't stay too long in one place. And since the game currently has a huge active playerbase, it's easy to quickly get into a new game when someone loses a match, so there isn't much waiting around between games.

The developer speaking out about another game doing something similar is rather silly though. The only way I could see that being a reasonable argument is if the original game were some little known title that got copied by another game that went on to become hugely popular. Battlegrounds is already a hugely successful game that's made a ton of money and has a ton of players though, so the developer has nothing to complain about and shouldn't be particularly worried about a much less popular game adding a similar game mode.
 

mac_angel

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finish making your game before bitching about others. I can't stand Early Access games that take forever to release, if at all. If someone else comes out with a full version before you do, then I'm happy as $hit for them.
 

Takasis007

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This Battle Royal mode sounds a lot similar to Ark's Survival of the Fittest game play mode. Bunch of people dropped on an island that has a wall that has a virtual globe that shrinks down to the center of the island and its last person standing. So I don't think it is very 'new', different sure, but not new. I could be wrong though.
 

toma98k

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Stop worrying about your competitors and keep making your own game better. Yes its a great Pre-release concept but you have alot animation, lag , visual improvements , optimisation and mechanics to fix now and quickly.
 
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