{"id":27,"date":"2021-01-24T18:22:39","date_gmt":"2021-01-24T18:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2021-01-24T18:22:39","modified_gmt":"2021-01-24T18:22:39","slug":"the-end-is-nigh-because-of-the-pubg-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/2021\/01\/24\/the-end-is-nigh-because-of-the-pubg-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"The End is Nigh … because of the PUBG lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This article originally ran under a different banner\/website in May of 2018 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

HEAR YE!!!\u00a0 HEAR YE!!!\u00a0 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!!\u00a0 THE END OF DAYS IS TRULY UPON US.\u00a0 After Bluehole successfully won their lawsuit against NetEase, other publishers have started suing each other to claim dominance over different genres.\u00a0 Nintendo and Capcom are in a legal battle for the rights to side-scrolling platformers.\u00a0 ID Software has gone after anything resembling a first-person shooter.\u00a0 World of Warcraft <\/em>is now the only MMO on the market.\u00a0 Games are disappearing as lawsuits fly fast and loose.\u00a0 Online stores like Steam and console stores have become barren wastelands with only the lawsuit winners courting their games.\u00a0 Every day a dozen studios shut down from the fear of the larger corporations taking them down.\u00a0 It is truly the end of gaming as we know it.\u00a0 THE END IS NIGH!\u00a0 THE END IS NIGH!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUT I HEAR YOUR CRIES!!!\u00a0 \u201cDOOMSAYER!!!\u201d you yell, \u201cTHE LAWSUIT HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN.\u00a0 CLEARLY, BLUEHOLE HASN\u2019T WON JUST YET!!!\u201d\u00a0 AND YES THAT IS CORRECT.\u00a0 As many of you know, this depiction is not yet reality as the lawsuits are still going on, but BE WARNED, this future is possible.\u00a0 While the chances of Bluehole winning this lawsuit are slim, the danger of this lawsuit cannot be ignored. \u00a0 If Bluehole is successful in winning this lawsuit, it would pave the way for publishers to engage in legal battles over game mechanics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the lawsuit about you say?\u00a0 A Cayman Island gaming company called NetEase produced two mobile battle royale games named Rules of Surviva<\/em>l and Knives Out<\/em>.\u00a0 Bluehole, in an attempt to obliterate these \u201cclones\u201d of their game PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds<\/em>, has taken them to court.\u00a0 Along with attempting to sue NetEase over the likeness of items such as armor, weapons, and medkits, Bluehole has attempted to copyright certain game mechanics due to not have anything that could be claimed as copyright. These mechanics include:\u00a0 Jumping out of a plane, enclosing the play area, along claiming they were the first game to implement a frying pan as a weapon. The last being something Team Fortress 2 <\/em>and Left 4 Dead<\/em>, would like to have a word with you about Bluehole.\u00a0 While the likelihood of Bluehole winning this lawsuit is minuscule, the precedent that mechanics can be copyrighted should not be set.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the future I painted earlier is probably unlikely, it should show how much the gaming industry depends on innovation.\u00a0 Just look at the timeline of the first-person shooter.\u00a0 It started with the original Doom<\/em>, slowly formed into story-based shooters like Half-LIfe<\/em>, then got into multiplayer with Call of Duty<\/em> and Halo<\/em>, and merged with MOBAs to create the hero shooter genre.\u00a0 Even this brief overview doesn\u2019t cover the gigantic family tree the FPS genre has accumulated, and the water that helps this tree grow is innovation.\u00a0 Overwatch <\/em>would not exist if the character skills and ultimate abilities belonging to MOBA could not be mixed into the FPS formula.\u00a0 Shovel Knights <\/em>might not be successful if it had not discarded the life system weighing down platformers, in favor of dropping resources when you were slain, a mechanic previously belonging to the 3D action games, Dark Souls.<\/em>\u00a0 Resident Evil 7<\/em>, along with taking much inspiration from the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre,<\/em> adopted a first-person view to create a claustrophobic atmosphere similar to other first-person horror games like Outlast<\/em>.\u00a0 PUBG probably wouldn\u2019t exist if it was not allowed to borrow most of what H1Z1 does with its battle royale mode.\u00a0 You are in a glass house Bluehole, may not be wise to be throwing stones.\u00a0 I am sure your favorite game nicks something from games of the past, and that is what, contrary to what Bluehole believes, helps the industry grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the developers of these games took a step back and questioned the ways previous iterations of games had done it.\u00a0 They saw sticking with the old ways as a shackle holding them back, but if games were not to borrow from each other, these games would not exist.\u00a0 We would get the same Mario platformers, the same Doom FPS, and many other old games too afraid to innovate in fear of using something already done.\u00a0 When you are allowed to implement other game mechanics, the game industry is allowed to craft new and exciting experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amongst being harmful for gaming as a whole, I believe this lawsuit is harmful to Bluehole itself.\u00a0 Time and resources are going into this fruitless lawsuit when they could be working to improve PlayerUnknown Battleground. <\/em>\u00a0Many players long to see improvements to the game\u2019s physics engine, in hopes, this could improve the driving physics.\u00a0 Some players would like to see other well-designed maps and a rotation of these maps similar to how the MOBA, Heroes of the Storm,<\/em> rotates its maps.\u00a0 I am sure all PUBG players would like to see Bluehole crackdown on cheaters.\u00a0 I am always a fan of pitting suspected cheaters against other cheating players; there is a poetic justice to it.\u00a0 I always hope for Bluehole to implement a unique art style that would help PUBG stand out from the crowd.\u00a0 Nothing too major, just something to possibly make them look different from the clones.\u00a0 It would make it easier for consumers to identify PUBG while making it harder for imitators to craft clones.\u00a0 I can understand Bluehole being unhappy with all the copycats running around, but they shouldn\u2019t be stifling creativity, they should be embracing it.\u00a0 Embracing creativity will beat the imitators, not this lawsuit.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article originally ran under a different banner\/website in May of 2018 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy. HEAR YE!!!\u00a0 HEAR YE!!!\u00a0 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!!\u00a0 THE END OF DAYS IS TRULY UPON US.\u00a0 After Bluehole successfully won their lawsuit against NetEase, other publishers have started suing each… Continue reading The End is Nigh … because of the PUBG lawsuit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}