Game over for copyright lawsuit against Epic Games' Fortnite
Call it a bad drop.
About a month after filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games over its popular "Fortnite" game, the South Korea-based developer of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" has dropped the suit.
Reports in the South Korean gaming trade publications indicate that Changhan Kim, the CEO of PUBG as its referred to by gamers, notified Cary-based Epic's Korean branch of the move on June 25. Shortly afterward, officials in the Seoul Central District Court took down the case's public file.
It was unclear whether the decision to end the lawsuit followed a settlement between the two companies, or whether PUBG had simply decided to abandon the case. Epic Games didn't respond on Friday to a request for comment.
Another copyright infringement lawsuit from PUBG, against a Chinese company called NetEase, remains pending in a U.S. District Court based in San Francisco.
"PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" took the shooter-games portion of the industry by storm last year. It features large maps and a 100-player, Hunger Games-like "battle royale" format that begins with a parachute drop and rewards the last player or squad standing.
Epic within six months of PUBG's debut added a battle royale mode to "Fortnite," which quickly took off and supplanted PUBG in popularity.
The two games differ stylistically, with Fortnite having artwork and game concepts geared more for the younger set. PUBG has also had frame-rate problems and other glitches that are sure-fire turnoffs in the shooter-games community.
Last September, Kim told the magazine PC Gamer that PUBG's then-developing beef with Epic was "not about the battle royale game mode itself."
Rather, he said, the South Korean company wasn't happy that Epic was dropping PUBG's name in its promotional material, and it feared that software refinements written for PUBG would find their way into Fortnite. Both games run on Epic's Unreal Engine 4, a set of basic software routines that serve as their foundation. Epic makes the Unreal Engine's source code publicly available and allows users to make changes to it. But its licensing of the code specifies that it's free to use customer feedback however it wants, and that any changes to the code returned to Epic become Epic's property.
Along with a code base, PUBG and Epic have an investor in common, China's Tencent Holdings.
Tencent, one of the world's largest internet companies, holds a minority share of Epic. Korean press reports speculated that the Chinese company intervened somehow to force an end to the PUBG-Epic lawsuit.
This story was originally published June 29, 2018 at 7:25 PM.