PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds aka“PUBG” recently welcomed Call of Duty to Battle Royale on twitter as the latter enters the popular game mode’s realm through its all-new game mode Blackout. It was a short, yet warm message for Call of Duty alongside a subtle “Bring it on”.
It’s been an exciting week for Call of Duty fans so far. Only a few days ago, the latest game in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series was revealed, with a solid few minutes of gameplay alongside two gameplay trailers. Almost a week removed from the game’s official reveal, there’s a ton of new information out there regarding Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 which has gotten fans excited. There will be new specialists, new maps, a new narrative-based Zombie mode, and Blackout- Call of Duty’s very own Battle Royale mode.
Blackout will combine everything great about Call of Duty and give a “Black Ops” touch to Battle Royale. The game mode will have a large map, around 1500 times bigger than the iconic Nuketown map. The map will also be a combination of many popular and fan-favorite maps that have come to life in the 10-year history of Black Ops. Expect to see old favorites pop up along with new ones, giving fans a lot of room to explore and have fun. Players will also be able to travel on this map using vehicles on land, water, and air.
After the official announcement for Blackout, PUBG creator congratulated Activision and welcomed them to the Battle Royale family. PUBG’s response to another game, especially Call of Duty of all games is surprising given that it hasn’t done this for other Battle Royale games. It’s well-known that PUBG was the game that started the Battle Royale hype, it was the original.
Games like Fortnite became popular after PUBG and the latter also went after Fortnite for a while and even considered taking legal action against the game. Soon, they dropped this, because not only was Fortnite much more popular than PUBG at this point, but the two games had a mutual shareholder. Tencent, the Chinese company has a 40% share in Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite. The Chinese company also has shares in Bluehole, the parent company of PUBG. Tencent also won the rights to distribute PUBG in China, so it’s easy to see why any interest in taking legal action against Fortnite would go away as the two have a mutual shareholder.
Whatever the reason was for PUBG to stop going after Fortnite, that didn’t deter them from going after NetEase as the studio sued the company for copyright infringements a month ago. The main issue was that NetEase’s “Rules of Survival” had similar game elements that were unique to PUBG such as the frying pan. Even though many predicted that PUBG would not win this legal battle because all shooter games have similar origins and there is bound to be some degree of similarity between all of them, they still went through with it.
Therefore, it’s surprising that they welcomed Call of Duty with such friendliness given their history. It could have been due to many reasons but one popular belief is that Call of Duty is much bigger than PUBG and it would be foolish to go after such a large franchise. Whatever the reasons were, it didn’t stop some fans from making fun of the situation:
Gonna sue them too?
— VanDep (@MrVanDep) May 17, 2018
The fast-paced, action-packed gameplay of Call of Duty incorporated into Battle Royale is an exciting prospect. Despite knowing much about the game mode, fans are excited. It remains to be seen whether a new Battle Royale game would affect PUBG or Fortnite but competition will surely be more fierce now that Call of Duty is also in the mix.
