PUBG Corp Burying the Hatchet with Fortnite | Games ReCAP Episode 029

[Music] all right there we go welcome to another episode of Kings recap another case of the Mondays so if you're watching the recording of this you probably don't know what they'll know know what went on but we went like 10 minutes with no audio but thanks for the twitch live Watchers out there letting us know that we are going fresh from the weekend and forgetting like the standard procedures and this show would not work without the twitch viewers who show up live seriously we would have been 50 miles into that one and then well I guess we don't have an episode for the day yeah well I am Brandon fan this is my co-host Larry Charles and we are bringing you games recap every morning 10:00 a.m. Pacific time on a twitch.tv horse slash blue underscore champs it's a great

place to see us [ __ ] up a Hannah have fun and see how we roll with the punches if you're watching this after the fact you're probably watching us on YouTube comments last blue chance if you want to support us and if you're supporting us thank you because that is keeping the lights on and helping us achieve our next immediate goal which is to turn this into an audio podcast so this is a daily thing obviously for the server space and everything it costs a little bit more and that's just covering up the bases right if you like any shirts with our faces on it go to a blue channel comm forward slash blue March and help us out that way yeah or become a touch prime subscriber whatever ways you want to throw your dollars at us do it by a pole we'll put it in the middle of the table I'll be more literal and I'll find a way to make the pole itself dance and that's probably just as surprising alright so

today's topic as we were mumbling quietly before is about how a pub G Corp is finally barring the hatch Yeah right so a little background in between epic and pub G bub G was originally well is still using Unreal Engine but they are the OG when the Battle Royale game has in they pop realized that genre to what it is today and it was an early access for a while until it was made public and epic is of course played a lot of support to make sure that their engine can handle 100-plus servers a hundred plus people per server and as you can remember if your developer especially Unreal Engine was mostly known for corridor type of shooter tight spaces it wasn't known to handle what it can handle today like open terrain right yeah so they really helped kind of that team to to bring it up to performance and in the meantime fortnight well which was more like a

tower defense type of game was not getting a lot of traction right it was a five year plus game at that point let's say I think they had sold 400,000 so I remember seeing a headline something like four hundred thousand early access or pre-order type customers who would pay full price which was decent but for a five year production with how many people I would imagine was on that team that might have been numbers that weren't as great as they were hoping for yeah which then led to the shot heard around the world yeah so to speak you know if you want to break that down you're a better in a story in the night yeah this is just unfolding when we were when fortnight finally made the decision all right they pulled the trigger and they this crazy great idea came to them in a visual word out of nowhere completely know where they added a battle royale mode into the fortnight and that was as they can at the said they say the rest was history and so of

course it became a phenomenon it was the best steel of the game that any company has ever done I mean no one's looking back and regretting that decision but of course there was a litigation because obviously there there feels I mean the pub G court rightfully felt like it will they were beautiful and betrayed because they were basically helping them bill a competitor yeah so the way to break it down quickly for any of the viewers out there pugsy corp using the Unreal Engine to develop they won't pump you corporate the time I think is just blowing it was blue yeah so they're using Unreal Engine to develop pub G they were you know submitting bugs and like making fixes and tweaks and working with the engineers at Epic Games to get their game optimized and running properly and unfortunately Unreal Games is also a game developer who was like hey guys we got this game we have this game mode that we've been doing all this behind-the-scenes stuff let's see what it would be like if that was in our game yeah which was probably like a

conversation between six people now I'm just assuming yeah and then over a weekend maybe two weekends three weekends a small team of people interested in doing the let's just see yeah ended up making something pretty dang cool yeah which now makes over 310 320 million dollars a month yeah something ridiculous like that and some sour grapes for sure at the same time people will defend epic saying it was fair game and it was a weird period because if you go if you want to have some fun of real-time reactions don't follow us just go to our Roundtable news on our game dev Unchained podcast we talked about how it was unfolding yeah but basically this is a developer that creates an engine that promotes any development right and blue hole at the time was an indie developer they were very small for the type of game they were making though and so being the number one game developer for Unreal Engine they took the idea and basically

put it in their own game and became a better game yeah right I think that like and I'll say this as a designer like we know that a lot of people borrow a lot of game ideas get repurposed recycled or reinvented in new software I have no problem with that where I always was like laughing was the like the time our game starts yeah on this you know airplane yeah parachute out of the airplane and you land on the map and then the fortnight version was well our game starts on a bus yeah yeah you parachute out of the bus blimp and then you win and I was like oh man see that's you can't hide the fact yeah you were there was a there was a few coincidences right because when we were when would happen right pub she was an early access for a while until December of whatever that year was and then fortnight came out with her mode two months later so they didn't even give him enough breathing room to being in a public release yeah like a gentleman all right and actually

give them like six months to actually enjoy that that period of being in public release and enjoyed the the money's flowing in so not just that they went out two months later and anyone that has any inkling of how game development works that game took a bit about a year to get to where it was right that means while they were helping pub G in early access they were developing this coinciding with that development knowing full well day one they will be a competitor it just seems too much of a stab in the back in front that's that's the part I guess that I always cited on the the blue hole I was sided with blue hole just in ethics yeah I didn't think that it was I didn't think how it was done was like right I thought that it was I disagree basically I disagreed with how that game was rolled out am i having the game exists hell yeah yeah I think it's a fun game I see it it's a cultural phenomenon yeah everything that everything good

about it is still good about it I won't ever take that away yeah but I I was one of the people who was like aw man yeah it could have been it could have been a better way yeah there could have been a better way that would have not shown other developers that the engine company might take what you make and then enjoy it for themselves and that was the I think that was the shock for me is they're like oh damn I didn't know ya didn't know you can never see the engine company do something like that yeah and unity of course to exploit at it everybody was kind of like pointing that out in public I mean it was too obvious of a mu the little little similarities like you jumping out a bus versus yeah yeah I mean there was just obviously borrowing elements that they felt was successful it's that old mine today oh yeah you can copy my homework just change it a little so the teacher doesn't know yeah man it's just I think it wooded it a fair game even if they did all that to at least give pup G six months you know I mean after public

release she always give him that because the thing that I commented when it happened was at least make it look like the King idea just came to you all right not like you were developing while helping this development six months to a year is fair game and that is coincidentally when all the other battle royale games started to click because that is when they saw the success and that is when they started to inquire yeah and even with Battlefield College it took them about six months to eight months to kind of incorporate that Mon and make it book free right two months book free issues but yeah but like two months to two months that's insane yeah yeah important I definitely did it better it was like as if they are a bigger established company with a lot more seasoned developers seasoned developers right being able to copy and paste

faster it's it's weird how that works imagine how a corporation can do that much faster than engine let's all go back to high school for some of us that might have been more recent than others but let's just go back to high school remember those group projects where I was like alright we're all gonna work on this term paper together or whatever right so you guys are busting your ass working on this term paper and then all of a sudden the day before you present one person in the group goes to the teacher presents it as their own game takes everyone else's name off of it yeah right and then that person gets an A and then you guys get a C because people are like wait we've heard all this information before Michael did it by himself yeah you know Michael gets the a you guys get to see how would you feel yeah I feel pissed yeah Jim II feel like we worked together on this product and now you're you're taking advantage of all of that before we can take advantage of it the company who has come to you using your engine paying your tax paying your engine tax right because we're making money now we have to abide by what we agreed in the contract which was over a certain amount we're gonna make sure you

get paid this so we're paying you we're developing the game with you so now you have a heads up and then you still took it and made your own thing which you don't then pay us for I don't think epic ever paid a cent to bool for fortnight ever no no no what was funny was club G was still paying 5% royalty after it being stolen from so they still pay the road yeah but today's topic is about burying the hatchet right so obviously being number two is never a bad thing you're they're obviously successful in their own way I may not be McDonald's but burger king money is still pretty exactly so that that's the situation that they're in right now and both fortnight is thriving and never looking back and pub G has its own faithful and loyal audience that I think in the marketplace it's very still unique right it's it's a consistent world all the other

battlefields in call DD they're always restarting their formula right every every installment and so pub G at least have the advantage of having a consistent marketplace to continue and we we talk about a few games recap and go like then Schofield has been brought into the fold and so the pub G universe is only getting stronger from this point forward and I look forward to it out of all the putt Battle Royale I enjoy at least looking at pub G because it's more grounded right it's more modern shooter its guns that I'm familiar with none of the sci-fi stylistic stuff I just want to get in the game and shoot and it feels better yeah it's like it's just too much for me right as a traditional first-person shooter like pub G is still having that pill is just too buggy right at this point and if they are bringing on great talent to kind of bring that Triple A formula to it I think it has a chance to

actually really claim its piece of the pie yeah which is always hundreds of millions right these guys are doing just fine yeah it's I'll look at it this way and this is I do complain about when people do this because I'm gonna be very hypocritical right now but again I'm just gonna reiterate like if we were to just if we were to take all the other games off the table and just look at the revenue that pubsey generates and then ask a developer do you want to be part of this or no they're gonna of course like it still makes a ton of money now rightfully speaking they might have felt like they should they deserve more they definitely didn't deserve the way that the partnership went between epic and blue holes so like I can understand why the lawsuits came about but I can also understand now where things are to just be like look we're just gonna you know what we may not win this one in court or it's gonna take resources to win this in court what do we really get out of it like the image that the industry already is where it is for tonight's not gonna get pulled off the marketplace just because blue hole tries to sue or get some sort of damages and

they try to none of that stuff no you just gotta make a better product and let the audience speak as a low B F can t he's like actually I share the sense of the building aspect of the game is distracting right I never liked that fort night part like it just felt like they carry that over just to kind of keep some semblance of the old game over yeah but like for me if you want to build shelter in a home and campout and whatever that's fine but the way it's being used it just feels so gimmicky you know I mean you're just building a wall and you just climbing your building along climbing it's like this is not even a [ __ ] no one builds houses like this it's a pursuit game and then it's a shoot maze building game yeah right but like I'll say this I'm not gonna lie to you man I have never played any sort of like video game shooting experience like that right like I've played a ton of shooters that one has just a unique approach to how combat is handled in that game and

loved her to hate it it was definitely far left of anything I've experienced before so it had an opportunity to be stand out you know what I mean so I didn't hate on that part but I will say this the skill cap was like when like when you start playing and you're like oh no I'm gonna fight and you like go over to your wall then you try to put your wall and you try to put your floor and then you see your other guy has like a like he's you new wall wall floor wah wah wah floor wah wah wah floor before you could even do one piece and then he gets real high up and just eliminates you like that was a very awakening moment from my early fortnight Daisy yeah that's my turning off moment all right I come from the days of like shooting people as the main crux of the game and imagine going paintballing and you're supposed to be on equal here's my gun here's you're gonna based on skill and you start building a [ __ ] fort it's like what the [ __ ] [Music] that's like to me it's it is distracting I understand that a spy game is far so far left and it makes it unique and edgy Toby was talking about Holly for seven

years that's probably reason why how do we how do we separate from Club G because they still had saved the world they never stopped pushing on save the world even now they're still updates for save the world why is anyone really playing that I think just to like just to say that they like to not totally concede and play every car that we just everything that we do right now we owe thanks to the idea to implement battle royale you know it's you know I mean it's the only residue of the old gang right save the world that they have otherwise it's just basically taking the characters and not in an environment right it's taking the characters and transferring them over it's a really cool world before tonight it's crazy good yeah but the president is um I hope it never happens again but it just shows like when you have the resources of big company you can copy a

successful indie company and make it ten times better yeah like the how fast they pumped it out and how fast the like overlap pub G team right with the experience and the money thrown behind it there was no way of them having a competitive edge like pub do you having kvitová right there was no way they could cut kind of combat the engine makers I get against their engine is like there's a it's like oh what up do you need can you tell us whatever you need what do you need for okay nighttime do you think it's prioritize like the internal bug that comes from fortnight that makes 330 million or the like the blue hole / pub gee cork team that is noticeable that is going down their game that they submit and like wants to have work done on XYZ yeah they would basically have that's what to have a closed-door where they're you know blue holes engine team has to be super on top of things and basically close that garden and not

have a communication because they are competitor now is like we want to enter this new future but can you help us implement it what is this feature that you're talking about please get our designers in here do you recall when blue hole and the pub Chico I think they were pub G court but this time I can't verify so I'm not gonna go on a limb and say but I remember somewhere along the line between one that company being blue hole is exclusively or being pub G Corp now there was the like we're threatening to not use Unreal Engine anymore altogether um it was shortly after I mean obviously there had to be and this is all speculation there had to be some kind of you know we're working on a competitor's engine is there any way to shift and obviously they haven't shifted and they're doubling down on using unreal because the resources to transfer things over is basically you're making a new game do you want to press pause on

your money-making machine and risk like changings yeah changing how it feels that looks that's a that's always a tough decision when you're changing engines you know right and the best course of action would have been like a pub g2 version right maybe they're still working on punchy to version who knows but as far as I can tell they're sticking with unreal because you know all those fortnight updates are really helping there for unreal there's so many developers worldwide that know how to use unreal so many schools that are teaching unreal because it's free yeah you know like you it has the better eco system if you're on the game development yeah in my opinion yeah and the updates are more regular right unreal how epic works is like they focus on their game and whatever falls out of that benefits everyone else unity doesn't have an equivalent of a fortnight game though all those features would have to be

built in-house or or started it's too tough to kind of go back and forth and the resources at unity isn't the same as a fortnight team that is all about making it work right the sad thing for me is just I think my business ethics I'd still will like silently weep for the pub G Corp side and this is an example that I've brought up before right where like let's say you go to a casino and you put a hundred dollars on the table and just for whatever reason you picked the right bet the right horse and you win ten million dollars in chips but in chips right so as you start pulling your chips across the table to yourself you're like yeah I get all this money other people nearby decide that you don't deserve to have that much money yeah right and like we'll take and take and take and take now you still let's say by the time you get your money you still have let's say like 8.2 right now you don't have the whole ten I'm everyone is still like you should be thankful you got the 8.2 but it's like no I should be thankful that I won the ten and I should have the ten like the

business ethics side of me is always like yeah I hate it when people lose out on what should rightfully be theirs but I understand where things are today why they are today and I understand the move of being like you just cut it cut the losses and let's move forward and let's try to come up with a good idea he's able to spread out our business and try to exactly so for I feel as a developer that's finally burying the hatchet with epic in going out saying that publicly I think they probably have confidence and their plans going forward with the acquisition of Glen Schofield's company striking distance and having a game plan of how to make it look better right play better and become a more of a staple in the battle game because I still feel like those two games number one or number two are very distinctly different right one is very stylized and I think has a younger audience maybe and player unknown still has a more

great right and even with battlefield and gal called you two kind of having their own version those guys are they come and go every year right you just gotta wait them out and then they leave and you still have the genre to yourself people are gonna go back to pub g2 as long as if they can start making it looked like battlefield and Call of Duty and is a persistent community they have it because those other two genres like we mentioned before will never switch to a persistent world because they're milking the calorie now and 60 selling $60 games is is their the business plan they're not gonna shoot that down until until they have to so we got a quick little couple of comments I'd loved it unwrapped it's a low B F can t low B F can t what could you do for pub g2 though I have no idea how you expand battle royale feature-wise I think first of all being the art guy

updated graphics I mean after the animation update rate effects there so there's a huge opportunity that's a reef rehaul like or make overhaul the existing game right now if they can make that and make it feel like a legitimate triple-a experience I'm in dude even though I hate the Ben Ariel genre as in I hate standing around but I like the grittiness of pub G where I would give it a try I better try and make it feel like camping right like you with your three other buddies and you're just scavenging and hanging out a bit so as a designer when I look at any type of game experience especially if someone's asking me how can we do a new version or how can we do part two or how do we expand this I just I remind myself of what are the essentials that made this experience one of the pillar essentials that made this experience in the first place when I hear battle royale I don't explicitly think a hundred

players on an island that jump off a plane that then look for weapons and try to kill each other yeah what I think of is let's just use a hundred players I think of a hundred players who through some sort of competition whittle themselves down to one yeah right now the jumping out of the plane doesn't change that part of the experience you could lose that altogether they could already be down there you know what I mean are they all on the same island or are they on instance versions of islands where it's one on one on one on one on one 25 times because it's a hut is a hundred people so it's a fifty verse 50 twenty-five to like any camp within yourself there's so many different ways that you can play the idea of whittle down the competition until you're the last man standing that as long as you think about it from the essential stand point you can start coming up with some really cool and great ideas that will still be a battle royale but it won't be there like such a closely like so similar derivative to the original that it barely feels like a new product yeah and that's why I always suggest or that's where I start from when I'm

trying to reinvent or here's an opportunity to have a hundred people in a server you know I mean that's that's attractive the way like you said has been derivative is everyone's trying to whittle down to one person right it's like all right you're playing team deathmatch let's introduce all these other gameplay modes you know capture the flag you know on uh wait wait go search and destroy right planning a bomb these these are different areas of the map that you can conquer the map and claim as winner everyone just died because I played at the bottom yeah exactly exactly all right that that I think motivates a lot of teams to band together and protect the base it become we talked about this before how awesome if we all have to approach and take over this base because a certain team like a team of twenty is staking their claim on it all right and the whole mission is to work together in and capture the flag like there's a lot

of opportunities there that shooters have figured out before you know how you you don't even need to invent a new mode inside of battery I'll just reuse the ones that you know called duty has like 18 modes right pepper some of that into the battery out pochi has I think the best chance to make that happen I hope they're thinking along those lines because yeah this this this genre needs needs an upgrade man like everyone's kind of doing that team deathmatch thing it's just it gets old in my opinion it's just like team of threes and for sure that's the best new system that's they have that's just emerging gameplay yeah truth true systems of like hey I'm playing solos but I see somebody else and we decided that we're going to squat up yeah that's just usually emerging gameplay I haven't seen one yet that's like hey you know you don't have to shoot this person if you go into the interface and then add to group yeah I think that's a that's a great way like you know counter-strike

has invented basically determining teams at the beginning allowing the players to figure that out during gameplay because [ __ ] battle real all you have is time right let that unfold naturally but the the cut that objective has to be I still feel a way call it it's not by normal when you have two choices they're binary it has to be that binary right it's either me versus you all right so it's either taking over the base or not in protecting the base right it needs to be someone very simple like that but how it like you said emergent gameplay can happen is that the squads have two squad up together to kind of get the common goal and then last men standing happens after you know you have ten seconds it's another way of like closing the bubble right close of the bubble to me is very a very smart band-aid solution but very

lazy game design okay I would love to see somebody do a battle royale experience where it was a snowballing type of game experience and you played until the end with this method so what I'm proposed here is instead of it being every man for themself and then when you die your experience is over you got to restart yeah because you're only getting I give you a suck or a beginner you're getting so little actual like fun of the game play out of it yeah whatever there was a snowball effect where two people meet up and if I get the kill you're like you're on my team now like you know where my you wear my colors and you represent me so you can't kill me any more of your bullets you can still kill other people yeah and then if you kill them they convert to my team right like it's a second tug of war so it like basically it goes from one person maybe I kill four or five people so not have five people with me we're all rolling out together trying to hunt down other groups of teams but as you get towards the end of the game its teams of like eight nine eleven you know all fighting each other and obviously there'd be some

sort of rule about how often or how quickly you switch to the team when you die or some [ __ ] maybe you get one exactly but you see what I'm saying right like now towards the end like you have this epic four on four four on eight but each person who played is hopefully gonna get to continue to play the game until the end of the match and the winner is decided like this is the original account here are his teammates less people feel like [ __ ] for losing and they're like yeah I'm on the team that won I contributed to the win I think that that'd be a I think that'd be pretty interesting because I hate playing for like 90 seconds well most people play for 90 seconds when people don't wait around right if you killed very quickly people switch servers right away yeah so like you exit out or you join a new game it's joining joining joining boot you're back in the bus you're waiting for your exfil point and there's like you're putting almost three three and a half four minutes between you and being able to shoot the gun again and like actually enjoy yourself

yeah and that's the part that like always bothered me was the like this is a lawman there's such a low yeah yeah I play first-person shooters to avoid the lull yeah like I'm not playing freaking like what do you play here I don't want to play these games yeah for you well we were playing where we were playing we were playing that steam game right the card game Auto chest yeah DotA unalloyed those kings because of the wait time and now the wait times are bringing it into the first person treat I hate it I hate that fact really I want to jump in this shoot I want to feel like I'm shooting you right I'm gonna want to build things around you and then shoot you yeah it's like I don't like how this merging of genres its is to me it's it's distracting and I don't like your people on my side what do you mean my people but that's what I'm seeing well then first-person shooter I feel like it's being polluted with all this

waiting and it's not fun for me I I jump in I jump out I'm not I'm not investing in spectating yeah right people watch twitch for that right I'm not waiting around in the server to wait to see who is number one so there's not even an audience kind of champion the the last few people that did survive right it's missing that whole element of playing with the same people most importantly I'm playing with a hundred people we enjoyed this experience let's play another round no it's completely a new new crowd every single time it's such a turn because it goes so fast there's no investment you can meet friends if you played it that moon that I proposed like if I spent 15 minutes with a stranger but we like it yeah sure you got me in the beginning but we have fun yeah I mean that's a cool thing going back to the basic why counter-strike will survive like a nuclear holocaust right counter-strike will still be available on Steam because of the fact that it's a very simple shooter game that's based on your skills and every round you're playing till the

end of that and most likely even when you play up to 15 rounds and the server restarts you're starting with same crowd again and that's the cool that you can play all night like that battle royale games now man every two seconds I'm shot after waiting 20 minutes in a server I'm switching server it's a whole new crowd so there's a it's that's not what first person shooters about man it's about like seeing that stupid-ass name right and hating that person the whole time and like not like spritzer and thriving on the fact that you're gonna get them back like a several rounds from now that's what I miss me so you ever watch those YouTube videos of like you know kid gets angry for getting killed or camped or whatever whatever and like you watch this video of this person progressively reaching their breakdown point because a better player just keeps killing them less yes oh you only gun because you got this no man okay just bust into tears alright

'fl you're that good you play with auto rifle c'mon man that was fun during our places a backseat gamer the skin was just upset at a gun that's available for everyone and it's like oh if you're so good don't use that gun but I love that dancer dude you're not gonna get any of that a fortnight oh or any other better a game and that's a thing too like it models up the the looting because part of the shooting genre is about enjoying different types of guns right and you do pick up certain guns but at a certain point to me at least it feels like noise you just picking up [ __ ] yeah you're looking at stats picking up [ __ ] like you there's no you're not glorifying over the using the Glock over the p90 or like there's no separation and that's the RPG element of first-person shooter right at the very basic level the

different guns that you use how it impacts your enemies and now you know the spray is different you know the timing you know the way you trigger it now I'm just picking a brand a thing of loot and just piling its extra weight right it just models up the whole idea and I just don't like the fact that you guys are taking away from me like everyone's playing these games like I was so boring yeah yeah well good to hear that a pugsy Corp is you know I hate to say good cuz [Music] I'm gonna give them credit for doing the nice thing I think that the ecosystem is what it is right now I don't think the landscape of the games was gonna change if they won or lost the lawsuit whatsoever yeah I'm happy to hear that they're still gonna make unreal stuff I'm not gonna lie I give them [ __ ] mainly just because of how it is this yeah but I think the game

is great it's a cultural phenomenon it needed to exist where you know it brought in the game game industry streamers are happy that game streamers know there's a bunch of millionaires was made from that game a million dollars exactly for a fortnight so there's I mean obviously exactly exactly so it created this thing right it put a put us really on the map I think for gamers and game developers and so it was a positive steal yeah so it's it's as good as it can get when a situation like that yeah thanks for joining us today's episode and please consider yourselves recap yes before we go off though we are about to switch to our other show the visible walls stay tuned for that it's about making breakthroughs and if you are joining us right now or been watching us we'll be back in five minutes

see you then thank you for everyone seeing how we [ __ ] up that's part of the fun if you don't know what we're talking about because you're watching the recording you should tune in once in a while on twitch it's a little fun to see how we just see the live version in mind to each other for five minutes before realizing it but that concludes today's episode and now Larry can say rewind the clip about two minutes and 28 seconds to hear me say consider yourselves recant [Music] [Music]