The order in video games, as far as I can make it was:

Minecraft (hunger game mod) > DayZ/H1Z1 > PUBG > Fortnite

At each step, the genre grew by 1 or 2 orders or magnitude. So while Fortnite is by far the largest BR game now, if you look at the log-graph, they each had an almost equal impact on getting to where we are today and are an important part of the genre's history.

I am pretty sure there was an Arma mod that directly inspired pubg in there somewhere. Maybe even older then then hunger games mod.

Edit: Oh I just looked it up. The mod was PUBG. I just realized it was the same guy who made it. It was released as a mod for Arma in 2015 by a player who went by the handle "PlayerUnknown". So I guess it was after the minecraft mod.

Don’t forget super bomberman 2!

Right, the problem is they didn't say PUBG + Fortnite. That's not single-handedly.

PUBG proved out the incredible appeal and potential of Battle Royale. Despite being a technical mess, it was a massive success and a game changer for the industry. It was the key catalyst and why Fortnite (and many others) added the mode.

This is not to take anything away from Fortnite though! They absolutely took it to the next level of awareness.

Also worth pointing out that PUBG uses unreal, so Epic Games makes money off the royalties AND gets visibility into the PUBG sales data. It's very likely that seeing those numbers made Epic Games shift focus.

The PUBG sales numbers were visible to everyone in realtime: during the heyday of PUBG Steamspy was still accurate, and the game was only being sold on Steam. Any visibility Epic got from the licensing revenue would have been irrelevant.

Plenty of games have had elimination modes for a long time. This is really just an evolution of that adding the mechanic of the map edges closing in.

Elimination mode is more generic. The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

>The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

Minecraft had nothing to do with it. PU was inspired by the Battle Royale novel/movie and The Running Man. He forked the Day Z ARMA2 mod and made DayZ: Battle Royale, and that predates H1Z1 KotH by 3 years.

> but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point

That's really downplaying the success of PUBG though. It was the #1 most watched game on Twitch before Fortnite overtook it. Sure, Fortnite is more popular now, but PUBG was literally the most popular game at the reveleant time.