The developers of PUBG: Battlegrounds are suing Apple and Google for refusing to stop selling so-called remakes on the App Store and Google Play Store. South Korean game developer Krafton Inc, along with U.S.-based PUBG Santa Monica, filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Central District of California. The lawsuit revolves around copyright infringement and calls for a trial by jury.
According to Reuters, Krafton claims its Battlefield expansion was launched in 2017, and a Singapore-based company called Garena started selling a remake around that time, and while the issue appears to have been resolved between the two companies, Garena A mobile app version has also been developed.
Also in 2017, defendants Apple and Google began selling this blatantly infringing mobile version of Battlefield, the lawsuit states. The infringing app was originally called Freedom Fire: Battlefield and is now called Freedom Fire. Then in September 2021, Garena released a second app, also a blatant copy of Battlefield. In December 2021, Krafton asked Garena to stop selling the games, and Apple and Google to stop distributing them.
Neither platform has removed these games. Krafton now claims that Apple and Google failed to handle legitimate complaints, meaning they only engaged in selective copyright enforcement. Krafton also claimed that YouTube, which is owned by Google, is allegedly hosting gameplay videos of the so-called knockoff games, and that there is even a live-action movie based on the game.
The developer’s claims are just the latest of many accusations that Apple and Google allowed cloning of apps to succeed. A recent example is leveraging the paid app version of the free online Wordle game. At least most of these copies have now been purged from the App Store, though. In 2018, the PUBG developer sued Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games for similar reasons. At the time, the company was “increasingly concerned” about its similarity to Fortnite.
The lawsuit was eventually dropped because both companies have Tencent holdings, so it is likely that internal coordination ended the matter.