PUBG drops lawsuit against battle royale rival Fortnite

The companies behind two of the biggest games in the world looked set to fight it out in a South Korean court — but now it looks like the battle has been settled.

The details: PUBG Corp, the company behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, last month filed suit against Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite. The former claimed the latter was ripping it off by using the same 100-player battle royale mode PUBG made famous. The two games are some of the most popular in the world, though PUBG is starting to fall from grace as the cartoonish Fortnite takes over. What should have been an even contest is starting to look distinctly one-sided.

Earlier today, Bloomberg reported the suit had been dropped, and neither side is saying what brought about the truce.

It’s worth noting Chinese company Tencent currently owns shares in both companies — 40 percent of Epic Games and 5 percent of PUBG Corp’s parent company Bluehole. Tencent was reportedly in talks to buy another 5 percent of Bluehole, so one wonders whether it had a hand in brokering the armistice.

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But wait. There’s more: It’s not just potential genre-copying that spurred the conflict between the two companies. As a Bluehole exec told PCGamer last year, “this is not about the battle royale game mode itself.” Since Epic Games owns Unreal Engine 4, the engine upon which both games run, there were apparently concerns it wouldn’t give PUBG proper support in order to give its own game an edge.

The fact it’s dropped the suit could mean the two companies have worked out those concerns out of court.

Meanwhile, in other good news for Fortnite, it appears its popularity might finally be the carrot that convinces Sony to enable cross-platform play. Sony Interactive Entertainment America’s CEO Shawn Layden told Eurogamer, “We’re hearing it. We’re looking at a lot of the possibilities.” This means you might finally be able to use your Epic account to play Fortnite on your Switch without getting locked out.