Recently, the Battle-Royale games have dominated discussions of video games at the school. Much of this popularity has been concentrated in Fortnite, which was greatly inspired by the original Battle-Royale game, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). When looking at these two games, it’s important to recognize the superior strategy, graphics, and teamwork of PUBG.

PUBG is gritty and realistic, relying on strategy between teams of up to four players (soon 10) and what they will do in battle situations. The map is much larger than Fortnite’s map, meaning that players take more time when surveying what to do next and when in combat, the adrenaline is amplified because of the build up.

Fortnite is colorful and cartoony. The much smaller map causes players to run into each other and increases combat earlier on. The building mechanics also change the gameplay, creating an entirely different strategy of quickly shooting and running around, instead of the prolonged fighting of PUBG.

The Battle-Royale genre began with the Japanese film Battle Royale in 2000. Inspired by this, as well as The Hunger Games novels, game developer Brendan Greene began modifying the games DayZ and Arma 2 to fit his vision of a fun, action-packed Battle-Royale game. In other words, a video game version of The Hunger Games.

Development of PUBG started in early 2016 and was announced in June 2016. Released shortly afterwards as early access, users could play the game as it improved. The popularity grew greatly as the PUBG formula became widely envied and adopted by other game developers.

One such game developer was Epic Games, which adopted the Battle-Royale style to their game Fortnite in September 2017, more than a year after PUBG. Inspired by PUBG, Fortnite took the game genre and built upon it, adding building mechanics but still copying key components of the gameplay like supply drops, the white and blue circles, and parachuting into the map where players fight in the same genre of fighting as PUBG.

A passionate Fortnite fan may reject this and claim that their game is very different from PUBG, not inspired from it at all. They are wrong. “Both Fornite and PUBG have achieved success using the same formula…” said Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, in a Bloomberg Business interview.

If a player wants quick matches in a game that is free, without having to worry too much about strategy, then they should feel free to play Fortnite. More power to them. But if they want a rich experience of extended and realistic strategy and fun teamwork, they should play PUBG.

Does it really matter whether Fortnite copied much of PUBG? Not really, as long as the players recognize this and continue to have fun playing their game. The same thing goes for the fact that 40 million continuous players play PUBG, compared to 45 million Fortnite players; it doesn’t really matter as long as the players recognize the facts.

The two games have two different tastes in their gameplay.

At the end of the day, PUBG should be known as starting the  the Battle-Royale video game genre, as the experienced game.