I didn't even blink, there's tons of precedent everywhere for copying the concept and doing it better than the first person. Minecraft wasn't the first to do what it did (commonly Infiniminer gets that credit), neither was Unreal Tournament (Quake), neither was Starcraft (commonly Dune 2 gets the credit, but also Age of Empires came out, did well, but didn't become more or less an official South Korean sport), nor World of Warcraft (Ultima Online and lots of others).
Honestly, possibly because of my Silicon Valley biases, I tend to think that the idea isn't sacred, it's that the execution on the idea is what turns a good idea into a successful one, and Epic executed way better despite PUBG's initial momentum. They threw it away with performance problems, bugs, cheaters, etc. and Fortnite capitalized.
I tend to agree but at the same time it’s hard to square that with the theory of IP (vs it’s implementation where the game mechanics can’t be patented), which says that nobody will be incentivized to develop new things if there is no state protection against copying.
I agree that the line is blurry, but I think there's a workable line.
1. You are still given a monopoly over selling your game, and someone else can't just make the same game using your assets, so at least you get to make money from your work via copyright.
2. It's a game, so I would argue that it's not worth as much to society to let you monopolize selling of a game mechanic as opposed to, say, a mechanical design. (I'm fully aware of patent controversies, but we're talking about games so I'm staying at broad strokes.)
3. I think there's an argument to be made that games are more like art than machines, and thus they count enough as speech that over-protecting IP rights in games would have a chilling effect.
Honestly, possibly because of my Silicon Valley biases, I tend to think that the idea isn't sacred, it's that the execution on the idea is what turns a good idea into a successful one, and Epic executed way better despite PUBG's initial momentum. They threw it away with performance problems, bugs, cheaters, etc. and Fortnite capitalized.