Last month, Kotaku reported that South Korea’s PUBG Corp., the studio behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, was suing Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, for copyright infringement. PUBG Corp. has now withdrawn its lawsuit.
Earlier this week, PUBG Corp. sent a withdrawal letter to Epic Games, the studio behind Fortnite. According to Bloomberg, the court case is no more.
Chinese internet giant Tencent has ownership in both companies, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds runs on Epic’s Unreal Engine.
PUBG Corp. would not say why the lawsuit has been dropped, nor would it say whether or not a settlement has been reached. Epic’s Korea branch didn’t issue a comment to Bloomberg, and Kotaku has also followed up with Epic for comment but did not receive one prior to publication.
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7 responses to “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Creators Drop Lawsuit Over Fortnite”
I’d like to think it was because they realised their suit was frivolous.
Kind of a shame that we don’t get to see a court rule that it was frivolous and setting a very fucking clear precedent specifically about why it was frivolous.
As it is, now everyone can speculate over whether there was a settlement over stolen code or Tencent stepped in and mediated or whether PUBG really was trying to enforce copyright over game mechanics or a competitor using PUBG’s name in a dev blog to explain their new game mode or whatever.
Yeah, I wonder why they thought it was a good idea in the first place. If it was the last man standing battle royale side of things, we were doing that in EQ in the early 2000’s. Zone set aside with no mobs, just PvP, and the GM’s would create a shrinking play area with copper coins. That was possible from day 1 in 1999, and I’m sure similar was around in other games before that. Still got the chatlog files somewhere I think, would be pretty easy to carbondate it.
Most of the other ideas had also been done elsewhere. Even the game itself was a mod in ARMA 2, and most modding rights becomes the property of that developer, not the fan, so its possible Greene would struggle to establish any rights anyway.
The whole thing just felt like “Its not fair. I made it popular and other kids are making all the money” sort of reaction.
Or whether it was a ploy simply to garner more media attention.
I think it’s more they knew it was frivolous, they were just banking on people not calling their bluff.
Not that much effort was required to call said bluff in the first place.
It’s hard to call what happened here. I know copyright law has a weird thing where companies can use the fact that you haven’t actively tried to defend your IP previous as a reason why they can steal your IP themselves. This could all just be so they can point towards legal documents showing that they investigated Fortnite and found that they weren’t infringing on anything.
Or it might not be to do with that at all, one thing I’ve decided is that it’s usually unwise to judge why a company’s lawyer has decided it’s necessary to do something, unless you k ow the full story.
Pretty sure the ‘defend it or lose it’ relates to trademark, not copyright.