Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’

Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by jchw on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:24PM (#18880992)

Ah yeah, remember when Epic Games stole the concept of a popular multiplayer battle royale game? I'm talking, of course, about The Culling, a game about a year older than PUBG. And other than the 100 player sized games and parachute mechanic, it's frankly not that different from the rest of them.

Snark aside, PUBG built a little on the battle royale formula. Fortnite built a little on the battle royale formula. Both Bluehole and Epic Games were madly successful. Maybe PUBG would've done even better had Fortnite BR not done so well as a free to play experience. But it could've also done better if it wasn't a buggy mess for like an entire year after launch, one that costs $20 and never seems to be on sale.

There's a reason gameplay mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is how game design evolves. I'd hate to live in the world where ID software permanently owned the rights for making first person shooting games.

One could certainly argue there is some conflict of interest in that Epic Games has a conflict of interest because they licensed their engine to Bluehole. But Unreal Engine is a fairly popular game engine, and I think it's unreasonable for them to not be able to be inspired by games written on their game engine.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by nitrogen on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:29PM (#18881013)

There's a reason gameplay mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is how game design evolves. I'd hate to live in the world where ID software permanently owned the rights for making first person shooting games

Wasn't there a problematic patent on The Incredible Machine that kind of killed that genre for a while?

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by reitzensteinm on Friday January 11, 2019 @12:06AM (#18881148)

Wow... yes.

Although Jeff Tunnel was really pissed off by it, which as a fan of TIM growing up makes me very happy.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577185A/en https://youtu.be/vXb30FDJqB0?t=393

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by jchw on Friday January 11, 2019 @12:32AM (#18881243)

Well, you can certainly patent game design - but you can't copyright it. Copyright is actually a bit scarier imo since it's, for the most part, internationally recognized.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by cma on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:19PM (#18880974)

Seems like all the major game companies have cloned PUBG. Activision with the new CoD, EA/Dice with Battlefield's upcoming battle royale mode, Epic with Fortnite (no gore and targeting a younger demographic and long since expanded into something a good bit different), and now finally Valve, who presumably took 30% of PUBG's revenue instead of the ~5% Epic were paid, without even providing much of the code, have also cloned it with CS:Go's new Battle Royale.

You can't copyright a game mode, and PUBG took lots of aspects from others too.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by meritt on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:08PM (#18880940)

I'm not following your logic. Game companies copy other successful games all the time. Why would using their engine make it more vulnerable? They don't own your game nor gain access to your code.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by bmurphy1976 on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:13PM (#18880955)

Fortnight copied pubg whining.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by MattRix on Friday January 11, 2019 @12:09AM (#18881157)

Anyone who calls Fortnite a clone of PUBG hasn't played Fortnite.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by bopbop on Friday January 11, 2019 @04:16AM (#18881972)

To be fair, it was the PUBG developers themselves who called Fortnite a clone:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/09/22/pubg-deve...

And also Epic themselves stated Fortnite was their "own version" of "Battle Royale games like PUBG"

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/09/12/fortnite-battle-r...

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by superkuh on Friday January 11, 2019 @10:42AM (#18884245)

I bought and played Fornite, the actual game, during it's beta for a long time. The battle royale version of it that people now call Fornite only came out much later.

I've played Fornite. I've played Fornite BR (at release). They were obviously a clone. What is Fornite now is something drastically different.

Anyone who doesn't call Fornite a clone of PUBG obviously only started playing Fornite BR and Fornite BR alone much later.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by oth001 on Friday January 11, 2019 @04:20AM (#18881989)

The most popular mode of Fortnite is basically PUBG+building mechanic (Minecraft).

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by stordoff on Friday January 11, 2019 @02:12AM (#18881582)

Other than the drop and the number of players, did PUBG really add that much _new_ to the film Battle Royale, which clearly inspired them (both in mechanics and skins)? It seems a little unfair to give them sole claim to the idea.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by mch82 on Friday January 11, 2019 @03:22AM (#18881785)

Bomber Man introduced 8 and 16 player battle royale in the 1990s. At the end of a match the arena begins shrinking to force players closer together. It also had variable size squad play. I’m surprised Bomber Man is never mentioned as an inspiration for these games.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by stordoff on Sunday January 13, 2019 @02:55AM (#18895647)

I'd never made that connection before, but you're right. There are definitely parallels to be drawn.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by voidwtf on Friday January 11, 2019 @10:36AM (#18884190)

Hmm, It's almost like you're implying that Epic didn't make those improvements available to Bluehole before Epic even released Fortnite.

Bluehole squandered part of their momentum by failing to continually rebase and track UE4 improvements that were made specifically for them. Allowed hackers to take over the game, and then cried foul when their player base dropped.

Also people seem to forget that H1Z1 had a royale mode before PUBG existed. ARMA 2 also had a mod, made by the same creator, who based the idea off of a movie of the same name.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by org3432 on Thursday January 10, 2019 @11:30PM (#18881020)

Even if PUBG was Unity and not UE, Epic could have made the game.

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Re:Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more o... by dwild on Friday January 11, 2019 @10:49AM (#18884295)

Yeah, that's called the free market.

If a company goes to Unity, they'll have to be careful that at any time they'll may remove your right to distribute your own game binaries. They don't even need to clone anything!

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