10 Video Games That Blatantly Ripped Off Iconic Franchises
6. Fortnite Battle Royale
The Game: It's important to stress that the game being discussed here is Fortnite Battle Royale, not Fortnite: Save the World, which is its companion game. Interestingly enough, both titles are still technically in early access. That doesn't stop them from ruling the gaming world. Especially Battle Royale, which gets much more attention than Save the World, even though the latter is the original product.
If you've somehow never heard of Fortnite Battle Royale, it's exactly what it sounds like: a battle royale game. 100 players drop into an area, and only one person (or group of people) survives the massive skirmish that ensures. The genre exploded in popularity when Fortnite BR came out, even though it was far from the first Battle Royale game ever made.
The Game It Ripped Off: Player Unknown's Battleground (PUBG)
PUBG was the most popular BR of its time until Fortnite came along many months later. Fortnite Battle Royale wouldn't even exist if PUBG hadn't exploded onto the scene first. That's why it's safe to say that Fornite "ripped-off" PUBG specifically, even though that game was also far from being the first BR.
Battle Royale owes its roots to mods, add-ons, and a movie. The Hunger Games was a 2012 film that inspired Minecraft Hunger Games, which were a series of servers modded to feature multiplayer matches that echoed the movie's experience.
Then there was DayZ, which was a mod for Arma II. Then there was the PUBG mod for Arma III, which predates the official game by about 3 years. While the BR mods aren't as popular as the BR standalones, they're still the building blocks of a genre that has dominated the gaming market for the past few years.