Sort of, but Epic Games seem to actually know how to program. PUBG, not unlike it's former competitor H1Z1, has languished with a terrible code base whose technical debt seems to have kept PUBG from ever really fixing things. The netcode is bad, the game runs AWFUL on all setups (Twitch streamers with state of the art computers were forced to play on low settings while streaming on the same computer), and there seem to be some particular performance issues with AMD CPUs.

Cheating is also a major issue.

So it was a clone, but basically a better one than the original.

Fortnite is the first survivor game that just works.

I felt bad for PUBG first, but PUBG is still such a huge mess, I do have to give it to Epic for building an extremely solid game that runs well and isn't rife with cheaters.

Shame about the business model, though.

This where the quotes around "benevolence" would come in. I'm a total fanboy for PUBG, so take this with a grain of salt, I totally understand why Bluehole threatened to sue when Fortnite released its PUBG copy. Now PUBG is in-and-of itself a copy of a copy (turtles all the way...) of a mod, so a lot of people balked at this.

PUBG had made quite a bit of money for Epic, through the UE4 licencing fees. This is akin to Amazon noticing how much money you made them through AWS and deciding to offer a free (arguably better, although I've never played more than 5 minutes of Fortnite, too much cartoon!) version of your product.

TBH, that analogy may be a bit unfair, but Epic is no saint.

Fortnite BR is. The Fortnite game is not.