The 'PUBG' craze is spreading

As Playerunknown's Battlegrounds continues its steady pace to the top of the video game popularity mountain, other studios have done the inevitable and begun trying to take their own slice out of the wildly popular battle royale cake.

Tower defense/survival game Fornite will be getting a new Battle Royale mode on all platforms later this month, developer Epic Games announced today.

It's incredibly similar to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG).

Just like PUBG, players in Fornite Battle Royale will parachute onto an island, forage for weapons and items, and try to out-survive 99 other players as the map gets smaller and smaller. The only major difference is that Fornite Battle Royale players can break down buildings and other resources to build structures of their own.

A week before Fortnite Battle Royale was announced, GTA Online received a new battle royale mode called Motor Wars. Earlier than that, iOS and Android developers were -- of course -- making knock-offs of PUBG.

It's clear that developers are looking to cash in on the PUBG craze.

PUBG is by no means the first battle royale-style game -- Brendan Greene, the developer behind PUBG, consulted on the popular 2016 battle royale game H1Z1: King of the Kill, and previously developed the Battle Royale mods for Arma 2 and Arma 3.

But since PUBG's arrival on Steam early access in March, the game quickly became the most popular title in the battle royale genre. The game's concurrent player count regularly surpasses every other game on Steam (it reached the 1 million player milestone this past weekend, a club consisting only of Dota 2 and PUBG), it inches closer and closer to Dota 2's concurrent player record of 1.29 million, and is regularly the most-watched game on Twitch.

And it's not even technically out yet.

In the reveal of Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic Games' worldwide creative director Donald Mustard specifically referenced H1Z1 and PUBG, showing how much influence the popularity of these games have in the world of game development.

We could be looking at an onslaught of battle royale games and modes coming out over the next couple years. Be ready.