Ah yeah, remember when Epic Games stole the concept of a popular multiplayer battle royale game? I'm talking, of course, about The Culling, a game about a year older than PUBG. And other than the 100 player sized games and parachute mechanic, it's frankly not that different from the rest of them.

Snark aside, PUBG built a little on the battle royale formula. Fortnite built a little on the battle royale formula. Both Bluehole and Epic Games were madly successful. Maybe PUBG would've done even better had Fortnite BR not done so well as a free to play experience. But it could've also done better if it wasn't a buggy mess for like an entire year after launch, one that costs $20 and never seems to be on sale.

There's a reason gameplay mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is how game design evolves. I'd hate to live in the world where ID software permanently owned the rights for making first person shooting games.

One could certainly argue there is some conflict of interest in that Epic Games has a conflict of interest because they licensed their engine to Bluehole. But Unreal Engine is a fairly popular game engine, and I think it's unreasonable for them to not be able to be inspired by games written on their game engine.

Seems like all the major game companies have cloned PUBG. Activision with the new CoD, EA/Dice with Battlefield's upcoming battle royale mode, Epic with Fortnite (no gore and targeting a younger demographic and long since expanded into something a good bit different), and now finally Valve, who presumably took 30% of PUBG's revenue instead of the ~5% Epic were paid, without even providing much of the code, have also cloned it with CS:Go's new Battle Royale.

You can't copyright a game mode, and PUBG took lots of aspects from others too.

I'm not following your logic. Game companies copy other successful games all the time. Why would using their engine make it more vulnerable? They don't own your game nor gain access to your code.

Anyone who calls Fortnite a clone of PUBG hasn't played Fortnite.

Other than the drop and the number of players, did PUBG really add that much _new_ to the film Battle Royale, which clearly inspired them (both in mechanics and skins)? It seems a little unfair to give them sole claim to the idea.

Hmm, It's almost like you're implying that Epic didn't make those improvements available to Bluehole before Epic even released Fortnite.

Bluehole squandered part of their momentum by failing to continually rebase and track UE4 improvements that were made specifically for them. Allowed hackers to take over the game, and then cried foul when their player base dropped.

Also people seem to forget that H1Z1 had a royale mode before PUBG existed. ARMA 2 also had a mod, made by the same creator, who based the idea off of a movie of the same name.

Even if PUBG was Unity and not UE, Epic could have made the game.

Yeah, that's called the free market.

If a company goes to Unity, they'll have to be careful that at any time they'll may remove your right to distribute your own game binaries. They don't even need to clone anything!