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Why Fortnite: Battle Royale Is What the Genre Needed
When Bluehole hinted at action over Fortnite: Battle Royale, the clone debate exploded. A look at the genre's short history suggests Epic's take is exactly the competition it needed.
Fortnite: Battle Royale arrived in September 2017, and almost at once PUBG developer Bluehole said it was considering “further action”, arguing that Epic Games had replicated its game, which runs on Epic’s own Unreal Engine 4. The community split over a simple question: is Fortnite: Battle Royale a clone of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or something more?
A genre only a few years old
The battle royale game is young. Most credit its creation to Brendan Greene, known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, whose battle royale mod for ARMA 2: DayZ in 2013 became a hit and pulled much of DayZ’s player base into a new community. A zombie-free mod for ARMA 3 followed, then H1Z1: King of the Kill, The War Z (later Infestation: The New Z after trademark and development troubles), PUBG and finally Fortnite: Battle Royale.
Greene has steered not only his own projects but much of the genre’s direction. First-person crafting variants such as The Culling and Last Man Standing are a separate branch. The clone question is really about the third-person shooters.
The case against Epic
On the surface, Fortnite: Battle Royale looks a lot like PUBG and H1Z1. Epic’s reveal trailer opened with the studio’s love of the genre and named PUBG and H1Z1, both connected to Greene and Bluehole, as inspirations.
That candour was probably Epic’s only real misstep, and the only thing likely to invite a dispute. Serious legal action always looked unlikely. Epic owns Unreal Engine 4, which Bluehole licenses, and there was no evidence of Epic using any of Bluehole’s intellectual property. Developers are free to name their influences, much as musicians credit the bands that shaped their sound without copying them.
Building changes everything
What Fortnite did well, long before battle royale, was combine several young genres into one solid package: resource gathering, crafting weapons, traps and structures, a zombie horde mode, a persistent home base, co-op with friends, real character progression, and a huge cast of heroes, skins, weapons and llamas.
Its battle royale mode keeps the gathering and building. That breaks the established meta of PUBG and H1Z1. Players can build gauntlets to funnel enemies, fortresses in the middle of the map, corridors lined with traps or towers to the sky. A wall is no longer cover, because it can be knocked down or built over. Tactics that work in PUBG get players killed quickly in Fortnite until they learn to use its systems. The resemblance is mostly skin-deep.
How genres are born
Late 2015 and early 2016 brought a wave of early access survival-crafting games so similar it was hard to tell them apart. Battle royale grew at the same time, from 2015 on. Disputes like Bluehole’s are what usually follows when a new idea takes off.
Gaming history is full of this. Donkey Kong laid the foundation for the platformer. Counter-Strike began as a Half-Life mod and launched a style of team shooter that led to games like Rainbow Six Siege. Herzog Zwei directly inspired Dune II, which set off the real-time strategy boom of the 1990s. The original Dungeons & Dragons ruleset from 1974 still shapes the systems of video game RPGs. Genres grow by borrowing.
Why competition matters
A monopoly is bad for any market, and an oligopoly is nearly as bad. Until Fortnite, a handful of games, most linked to Greene, controlled battle royale. Epic was the first major studio to take the format and build on it with its own mechanics. It also gave console players a battle royale before PUBG reached Xbox One.
Players benefit whether or not they like Fortnite. Bluehole and other developers now have to improve, and more studios are likely to try their own versions: larger team modes, faster shooter-style variants, and other ideas the genre has not yet explored.
The format itself comes from Koushun Takami’s novel Battle Royale, published in 1999 and filmed in 2000. Every game in the genre owes its premise to that book.
Final thoughts
It is easy to call Fortnite: Battle Royale a PUBG rip-off. It is just as easy to say Bluehole was upset at being beaten to the console market. The more useful question is what this means for the industry and for players. Similar disputes in the past launched whole genres and some of the best-loved games. Developers would do well to treat games inspired by theirs as a compliment, and players would do well not to dismiss a new game because it looks familiar. Brendan Greene and Bluehole turned a cult novel into a genre; Epic’s arrival is a sign that the genre is healthy.
Questions readers ask
Is Fortnite Battle Royale a copy of PUBG?
It shares the battle royale format, which PUBG did not invent, but its building system changes how fights work so much that PUBG tactics fail in it. Epic openly named PUBG and H1Z1 as inspirations.
Who created the battle royale game mode?
Brendan Greene, known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, made the first popular battle royale mod for ARMA 2 DayZ in 2013. The idea itself comes from the Koushun Takami novel Battle Royale (1999) and its 2000 film adaptation.
Why did Bluehole object to Fortnite Battle Royale?
In September 2017 Bluehole said it was considering further action, arguing Epic Games' new mode replicated PUBG's experience. Epic also licenses Unreal Engine 4, the engine PUBG runs on.