PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Creator Wants Less Copycats, More IP Protection

It’s human nature to like something, and when you like something, you want more of that something. What’s also human nature is if you see someone making money off of something, and you feel you can do that as well, you do it. That makes you a copycat, which isn’t illegal, or even wrong to some degree, but it can get annoying in some cases. Take, for example, the situation surrounding PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The popular Battle Royale game has been living on Cloud 9 of sorts since its launch earlier in the year, but it’s come at the cost of a lot of copycats.

One of the biggest perpetrators of this is Fortnite, which was an entirely different game at launch, but, then proceeded to add a Battle Royale mode of their own, one that many, including PlayerUnknown himself, noted was an exact copy of his game.

Though months have passed this particular incident, copycats continue to show up, and PlayerUnknown is not happy about it. In an interview with BBC, he voiced his frustrations about this:

“If it’s just copycats down the line, then the genre doesn’t grow and people get bored.”

He is right about that, if people keep doing the same thing over and over again, people will get bored. Ironically, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds proves that beautifully. For this game was not the first Battle Royale game, that was H1Z1, but, PlayerUnknown took that formula, and improved it, and refined it, and that’s why it has the most players on Steam on 20 million purchases.

But even if the copycats were to stop, he wouldn’t be happy, because games don’t have a certain level of protection against copycats, and he feel there should be:

“In movies and music there is IP protection and you can really look after your work. In gaming that doesn’t exist yet, and it’s something that should be looked into.”

That’s a big ask, but it is an interesting notion. Do you think such protection should be given to games?