Brendan ‘PLAYERUNKNOWN’ Greene presented a session at GDC 2018 yesterday, titled PLAYERUNKNOWN: From Mod Creator to Creative Director of PUBG.
As usual during these presentations, the session ended with PLAYERUNKNOWN taking questions from attendees. One of them directly asked his thoughts on the incredible success of Fortnite Battle Royale and the Creative Director of PUBG didn’t shy away from replying in detail.
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I have many thoughts.
No, it’s great. I mean it’s great that the battle royale space is expanding and that Fortnite is getting battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That’s it, really.
It’s just great to see. I get asked this question sometimes, like, ‘What’re you doing to combat this?’ I got it when PUBG came out, we were killing H1Z1. Or when H1Z1 came out, it was killing Arma 3. I never set out to kill any of those games. I don’t want have this attitude like ‘We’re better than them.’ We are all a relatively friendly group; we don’t have a real-life GDC battle royale. I really try to combat that perception that I want other people’s games to die. It’s great that more people are exploring this space and more people are getting to play these games. This year I think we’re going to see a big expansion.
This appears to be a conciliatory statement of sorts after Bluehole’s initially vehement reaction to Fortnite Battle Royale. At the time, VP and Executive Producer Chang Han Kim expressed the concern that Epic was “replicating” the experience of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and even alluded to potential legal action.
Nothing came out of it on that front and it’s safe to assume it never will, thankfully. Besides, even if a recent analysis by Superdata shows that Fortnite Battle Royale now brings in more revenue than PUBG, the latter is still doing incredibly well with an estimated $103 million in February – and PUBG still isn’t available on Sony’s PlayStation 4 console, unlike Epic’s title.
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There’s certainly no reason to squabble, then, even if PLAYERUNKNOWN is definitely right about a big expansion of Battle Royale modes across many games this year. Dying Light: Bad Blood, Hunt: Showdown and The Darwin Project (both now in Early Access phase), Fear The Wolves and several others – including some from big publishers, in all likelihood. Will PUBG and Fortnite be able to stay on top?
In related PLAYERUNKNOWN news, he and Chang Han Kim posted a video thanking the PUBG community for the game’s first anniversary. The video also includes a brief look at the upcoming map inspired by Southeast Asia locations.
