What was unique about the PUBG / Unreal Engine situation is that Epic had only used the Unreal Engine for things like Unreal Tournament. They have a large set of customers who license their engine. When PUBG, which was originally created as an Arma mod (like DayZ), was moved to a standalone company by PlayerUnknown, they began looking for engines to rapidly rebuild what made Arma special. The bullet physics, look of the engine, environment and so on. They chose the Unreal engine.
PUBG took off as soon as the demo was released. There was an ongoing business relationship where PUBG developers worked with the Unreal engine developers to add features to the developer tools, and changes to the engine, to support features that PUBG needed. These changes of course were merged back into the main Unreal engine branch, and this allowed Epic to take the work for a battle royale game from the business association with PUBG, and rapidly cash in on the battle royale craze.
That’s what is different about this, versus just a company creating a clone. It was a dangerous thing to do from Epic’s point of view too because I’m sure there could be cases where other customers could see the engine company help them create an initial product, and then use that work to rip them off with a clone.
From a business practice standpoint, this is similar to what Amazon did with Amazon Basics. Where Amazon became the main, or only, online marketplace for many products. They ran reports and data to find which third party products were selling well on their site… And then they set up stuff like Amazon Basics to essentially copy them. Eventually due to the price and shipping advantage, and the Amazon name, the original products get replaced. And it feeds into Amazons profits.
Now with AI, all someone has to do is find out which games are popular and then drop some money on tokens to try to vibe code a competing game.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 4 days ago
Pubg wasnt the first or only battle royal game. There were others that were blowing up before and during. Fortnite season 1 wasnt at all a rip off. They implemented a simple game type popular in several games at the time. Pubg got greedy and thought they owned the entire genre because they were blowing up. Theres no evidence that fortnite battle royal was released due to snooping by epic staff.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Name a battle royale game that released before PUBG
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I’m curious how they’d respond to this… as far as I know, there were a handful of mods for other games that kinda did the concept but no actual games, certainly not the way any games do BR after PUBG’s release. H1Z1? But not really, as PUBG’s creator did a lot of that…
the closest things would probably be last-man-standing shooters but those aren’t BR games.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 4 days ago
H1Z1 is probably the technical first but I seem to recall that BR mode didn’t take off because the game had too much jank to be fun.
missingno@fedia.io 3 days ago
I believe the Minecraft Hunger Games mod was where it all started.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 3 days ago
Minecraft hunger games, h1z1, the culling. Just going through a few shooters and search hunger games or battle royal brings up game modes from way before pubg for quite a few games, arma, half life, runescape. Hell theres even a movie with the same concept.
Then you look at pubg and you see how many battle royal games released in the same few months and you think they copied pubg? Thats impossible. You cannot copy a game in a few months. Its more likely they were all looking at h1z1 which was very popular and topping twitch with all the major streamers playing it. Then most of the following games put some kind of spin on the formula and made it something completely different.
RabbitBBQ@lemmy.world 3 days ago
These were all created after the original PUBG, which was an Arma mod created similar to DayZ. This existed as what we know of battle royale before any other clone, and it was also created by PlayerUnknown.