No specific reason was provided for the withdrawal of the infringment lawsuit. Tencent may have weighed in since they have a 40% stake in Epic Games while they have invested over $470 million in Bluehole (approximately a 10% stake of the parent company which owns PUBG Corp).
However, a few of us (including former Devilian player and colleague Giko who has his points of contacts in South Korea and has been back working/living there again) were firing shots back at Bluehole about the stupidity of that move given they were putting their entire portfolio of IP’s at risk due to their licensing of Epic’s Unreal Engine.
Epic didn’t blink one bit once the lawsuit was filed in Bluehole’s local jurisdiction and it actually would have been stunningly glorious if Bluehole ended up proceeding because “in our (mine and Giko) humble opinions”, Bluehole would have had its ass handed to them on a platter for coming into violation of their contract where Epic would’ve exercised the nuclear option to pull their license for ALL of Bluehole’s titles.
There are some folks who believe that Epic wouldn’t take that route against a huge revenue generator (which they receive a percentage of via the licensing of the engine) because it would be like shooting themselves in the foot. The problem though is it is part of the terms written in the contract (normally associated with litigation by the licensee against the licensor usually when it comes to flaws in the engine itself; in this case, the lawsuit was nothing to do with that but was something that accused Epic Games for plagiarism on some VERY flimsy grounds which as I stated in my prior linked post, was similar to the 1988 copyright infringement lawsuit that Apple lost against Microsoft.
IMHO and based on Bluehole/PUBG Corp’s flawed initial lawsuit, I wouldn’t have looked at the pulling of all of their licenses (by Epic) as having a chilling effect with their other licensee’s of the engine. I would have looked at it as sending a signal to other companies to not file stupid lawsuits that don’t hold a lot of merit.
