Fortnite-PUBG Lawsuit: PUBG Corp Drops Case Against Epic Games

PUBG Corp, the studio behind battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) has dropped its lawsuit against Fortnite creator Epic Games. This comes after filing a case against Epic Games in January of this year in South Korea alleging copyright infringement. PUBG Corp had sent a letter stating its withdrawal of the case to Epic Games' lawyers and the case has been closed according to the South Korean court website. According to Bloomberg, PUBG Corp and its lawyers confirmed that the Fortnite lawsuit has been dropped but would not say why or explain if a settlement had been reached.

This comes at a time right after PUBG creator Brendan Greene had to defend his game from being labelled as an asset flip.

Greene stated that it kills him "a little inside" when it's referred to as such. In addition to this, developer PUBG Corp took to Reddit to explain further, trying to elaborate on the intricacies of game development in the process.

"The first thing to understand is that if you’re just starting up a team, you’ve got to lean on asset store work because that's the only way you can spin up a game fast, and for a reasonable price, to quickly find the fun. Hiring an art team of 40 people to 'try a game' and 'see if it's fun' is simply not a smart way to work—this is what the asset store is for! It’s a great resource for teams that want to work smart," claims PUBG Corp Communications Lead Ryan Rigney. 

All this is made more amusing when you consider that PUBG is running on Epic's Unreal Engine and uses pre-made assets from Epic's storefront. With the lawsuit over, hopefully PUBG Corp would devote resources to making the game better after losing nearly half its Steam player base since its January peak, as per data provided by video game tracking sites.

SteamCharts shows that PUBG is now down to a peak of 1.75 million players in the last month, which represents a drop of 46 percent from its peak of 3.23 million players back in January this year. Average player count has been falling every month too, having gone from 1.58 million in January to 0.8 million this month. The highest drop-off was in May (20 percent).

PUBG announced it had hit 50 million units sold on PC and Xbox One combined. The game is not available on PS4, which is the more popular console. Meanwhile, PUBG's biggest battle royale competitor, Fortnite, is available on all three: PC, Xbox One, and PS4. On the portable front, PUBG is on Android and iOS, while Fortnite is available on iOS and Nintendo Switch, where it racked up 2 million downloads in less than a day.

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