Fortnite: Battle Royale has made a big splash in a short amount of time. The game’s popularity has been surging, but it’s also been dogged by criticism. In spite of that, Fortnite just announced that they surpassed the 7 million player mark, though it’s important to note that those 7 million players come from both Fortnite and Fortnite: Battle Royale, not just Battle Royale.

That 7 million figure also encompasses players on PS4, Xbox One and PC. No such numbers have been released for PUBG. However, we do know that PUBG routinely pulls in a concurrent player base of around a million or more and is solely available on PC.

PUBG was the first of the two games to launch earlier this year, but since then Fortnite has made a habit out of beating them to the punch around every corner. The PUBG devs announced early on that they’d be bringing their game to the Xbox One, but its offical release date is still a big question mark. Meanwhile, Battle Royale made its debut on both the Xbox One and PS4 two weeks ago, just a couple of months after it first went live on steam.

Of course, both games are still in Early Access and aren’t slated for full release until sometime next year, which makes their player numbers all the more impressive. 

Fortnite has one big thing going for it that PUBG just doesn’t. The dev team behind Fortnite is Epic Games, one of the biggest names in the business. They’re also the creators of the Unreal Engine, which PUBG is built on. Meanwhile, PUBG is being developed by a relatively small studio called Bluehole.

The sheer size of Epic means they shouldn’t have much of a problem staying ahead of schedule and ahead of Bluehole. Perhaps that’s why Bluehole was so upset when Battle Royale was released. “We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG’s development as they are the creators of UE4, the engine we licensed for the game,” said a Bluehole press release. After “reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.” Those accusations are pretty serious and have much of the gaming industry scratching their heads. How similar is too similar and how much can a game own a genre. 

For now, answers are few and far between. We’ll just have to wait and see where this ongoing battle leads.