"When we first started, there was a shooter genre, and there was a subgenre within that which was battle royale," says Taeseok Jang, Krafton's head of the PUBG IP franchise group, as we talk on an upper floor of one of the Korean publisher's many gleaming offices in Seoul.

"But now it's become its own genre - and there's a shooter genre that's kind of a subgenre to battle royale." Presumably, what Jang means by that last part isn't that all shooters are a subgenre to battle royales, but that the shooting is really just one aspect of them these days.

If that's the case, then I'd say he's right, at least in part.

PUBG: Battlegrounds, for instance - the battle royale game of what is now a wider, Brendan Greene-less PUBG franchise - is increasingly a stage for collaborations and events, from luxury brands such as Balenciaga and Lamborghini to K-pop superstars Blackpink.

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Plus, some other actual game modes as well, as most recently exemplified by the enjoyable, if slightly underwhelming PvE looter-shooter roguelite, Xeno Point.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Warzone's garish cosmetic collabs are the content of regular memes, and then there's Fortnite.

Fortnite is, at least by its own stratospheric standards, not in a brilliant place.

From my own conversations with Epic, and piecing together the unspoken but implied lessons of its numbers, it became clear Fortnite's playtime had dropped considerably - "the logical conclusion" from the figures, as Epic's Steve Allison put it to me at the time.

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And while it "still remains the biggest game in the world on many fronts," in Allison's words, Epic has since hoiked up the price of V-bucks and laid off an enormous number of developers.

Much of this is tied to other, more existential threats currently being wrangled by video games at large of course - dwindling disposable income, ever more aggressive competition from the engagement economy, more ## Editor's Note The gaming community will surely have mixed reactions to this news. Source: [Eurogamer](https://www.eurogamer.net/pubg-fortnite-battle-royale-future-taeseok-jang-interview)