PUBG was a fucking copy of h1z1 which was a copy of the culling which was a copy of the arma mod. So yes, i can confidently say FUCK BLUEHOLE when they are threatening a lawsuit over their so called originality.
#1 - you understand that
three of the four projects you just named were headed up by PlayerUnknown, right? I know you know, because you brought up The Culling, and damn near nobody on GAF knew or talked about The Culling before some of you noted that, hey, finally, it's a BR game we can point at that
wasn't made by Brendan Greene!
#2 - The issue isn't over Bluehole believing they have some alleged claim to the Battle Royale concept and format. Bluehole wouldn't have had grounds to complain (they've said as much) had it been literally anyone else besides Epic to bring out a PUBG alternative like this. However, it was Epic. Bluehole's biggest business partner in the endeavor that is PUBG, undercutting PUBG during a time when PUBG is potentially breaking more and more records by being the first to market with a PUBG 'clone' by leveraging their unique position.
I don't think they'll litigate; I don't think they even have grounds to. Don't get so hung up on that, though. Fortnite Battle Royale is cool, but it's not hard to see how PU and Bluehole might not be suuuuper happy about Epic taking everything they've learned and developed through their collaboration with Bluehole (both tech-wise and how to effectively structure a BR game - mentions of other games might hold up better if Fortnite BR wasn't clearly borrowing from PUBG to a greater extent than it does the other games of this persuasion), and about how Epic has almost immediately appended that knowledge to an existing game of theirs.
As a player, though, I'm not too invested in this debate, and I expect Bluehole is kicking themselves hard for jumping the gun here and putting out something of a combative statement on the matter. After all, there's a reason I used quotes around the word 'clone'. Fortnite BR and PUBG are worlds apart in terms of both the intended experience and the way the games actually play out. As someone who has played both, that fact alone has me chuckling at how many people in this thread are implying quietly that Fortnite BR is simply a better game for fans of BR gameplay than PUBG is. I don't expect Fortnite BR to leech very many players from PUBG, and I don't expect it to get anywhere near PUBG's success, either, but it will be a success all its own, and the two games can absolutely co-exist without cannibalizing each other. They share a basic skeleton but they've got two totally different flavors: Fortnite BR feels more like this creative deathmatch variant and PUBG is more of this tense hardcore variant.