> Fortnite wasn’t designed to be a Second Life-style experience, or even a digital “third place“; it became one organically.
I don't even know what to do with this comment. All multiplayers games are designed to be a third place, that's why they have groups that stay together between rounds, integrated voice chat, and friend systems. Multiplayer games have been designed to act as third places for ... a long, long time now.
> Epic has also built up another great and particularly hard to establish advantage: some 200MM+ registered user accounts.
I don't think that Fornite players as a group think that setting up a new user account is a big deal. Having an account is not a particularly big point of friction any more.
> Third is the threat posed by the shift to cloud-based gaming
do players actually want this? I've only heard that players want this from "thought leader", technology speculator types. Never in my thousands of hours of online gaming have I ever heard another player talk about this.
> they will be able to support Unity and other engines as well (interoperability will obviously be critical to any Metaverse and has long been a passion point of Sweeney’s).
this seems pretty divorced from technical and political reality.
I don't have access to any non-mac laptop - nor any computer with the hardware required to play a AAA title. When an interesting title like shadow of the tomb raider came out I was always put off by the sticker shock of buying a ~$1000 machine + desk + monitors that will take up a large portion of my apartment, and be obsolete in 2 years. For what amounts to ~80 hours of entertainment if I only play 2 AAA titles per year.
Trying out ParSec gaming was game changing for me and I've played 3 AAA titles with max settings in the last 3 months on the same PaperSpace cloud I use to do my personal ML projects. for a total cost of $30 in cloud credits, from my MacBook air sitting silently on my lap.
One can buy an $700 machine every 5 years and play 3 games per year acquired at steam sales for $10 - $20 each. They can be aaa titles from 2-3 years back or less demanding items.
That is an average of $185 a year for 80 hours of fun or little more than $2 per hour.
One can also get or build a a micro atx machine that does not use much room and hook it up to a kvm switch and a keyboard.
At the touch of a button it goes from an extra monitor for your laptop to connected to your micro desktop.
If you like old games even better a $500 machine could provide hundreds of hours for years.
Say 100 per year and a few hundred hours per year = 50c an hour.
You clearly haven't invested in PC gaming because your vision of how it would play out is quite misguided.
I play exclusively on the PC, and only update the majority of hardware (CPU, RAM, motherboard) every 7ish years. GPU about every 4 to 5 years. When a system is first built, enjoy the new AAA games on "ultra" settings, and lower settings on new games do that at 5 years you're picking "medium" or "low" for quality settings.
80 hours for 2 games? Most gamers log hundreds of hours into a game over a year, not 40. Games like fortnight, pubg, destiny 2, far cry, sky rim, Witcher 3, etc, can easily rack up several hundred hours of play thanks to exploration of deep content or multiplayer modes.
If I do the math, it's a few cents per hour of entrainment. Much cheaper than any other venue. Even hiking at the local forest preserves charge more money for bringing in a car and parking.
No they don’t. Assuming you ‘shop smart’. A PS4 slim 1TB on Amazon sale set me back ~€200. PS+ goes for ~€40-50 a year, and gives you a few free games a month. If you’re willing to buy secondhand physical and/or be patient, most console AAA games can be had for €20-40 after a month or two. Hell, I bought God of War 2018 on a PS store sale for €35 three months after release, and that’s a premiere Playstion exclusive.
Let’s say you put together a gaming PC for €650 and buy AAA games for €10 a pop. We get the following situation after 3 years of ownership:
PS4
* €200 for the system
* €135 for 3 x €45 for PS+
* €360 for 12 secondhand AAA games
€0 for ~7 good PS+ games (36 months x 4 PS+ games x 5% average chance its a decent game)
* €695 total cost to experience 19 games
PC
* €650 for the system
* €180 for 18 AAA games via Steam / Kinguin / whatever
* €0 for 1 AAA game free with your GPU
* €830 total cost to experience 19 games
Now at this point avid PC gamers will huff and puff that their games will pretty much be eternally compatible, console gamers will gleefully point out how you need to constantly fidget with your PC for optimal graphic / driver settings on the PC, etc etc; Those are for yourself to decide. But purely on price, a PC can’t compete with a console.
I'm a perpetual solo player and haven't gone into FPS titles yet, but the experience was more or less perfect for third-person titles like tomb raider. FPS performance may depend on the title and how close you are to the cloud. I'm 7-10 ms (one-way) from PaperSpace's NY2 facility, and 10-15 ms from ec2's us-east facility on ICMP.
> Or never ending games with repeat buys? (snip) That tells me that whether or not what gamers 'want'... what they spend on is cloud based.
That's not what cloud based means here. "Cloud based", in this context, refers to video streaming of a game rendered within a data centre, remote-desktop-ed to your computer like a YouTube video. (The article calls it a 'cloud-based streaming solution'). Lots of companies offer this (GeForce Now, PlayStation Now, etc). But almost no players actually play that way today.
Lots of players are spending money in online "never-ending" / "repeat-buy" games. (Fortnite, Apex, Blackout, Destiny, Warframe, Path of Exile, WoW, etc). But approximately 0% of players are spending any money on "cloud-based" ones (using the articles definition of cloud-based).
Cloud gaming was tried before, with a company called OnLive. Interest peaked shortly after they announced in 2012, and then they crashed and went bankrupt because nobody cared enough to pay for it.
The thing with fortnite is that it was free, available and nearly first. It's success is a direct relation to the apex of those things together.
It's success will not be emulated even if better games (Like; Apex Legends from Respawn/EA) come to the fore.
It's unwise to use their model because, like world of warcraft, it only really works once or for one incumbent.
Fortnite works because "it's fortnite", it's already successful as hell, any monetisation, even small amounts is enough to catapult it to profitability.
Time will see if I'm right or not, the industry is changing, large studios need more money if they're to continue making AAA games and it's clear that people begrudge spending $60 for a game and then having monetisation inside. I hope EA's gamble with Apex works, not to prove me wrong but because I think it's a good game.
Fortnite on the other hand.. I just don't get, the combat/controls/graphics/hitboxes/animations are kinda dirt. But I think it's popular because it's popular, like Paris Hilton.
> he combat/controls/graphics/hitboxes/animations are kinda dirt
This is just wrong. The game became popular because its a pretty damn good game and quite fun. Yes, it is somewhat derivative but most things are. People forget that Epic is an old school titan of the gaming industry that pioneered a lot of what we see in FPS titles today. They know what they're doing, even if they lifted some inspiration from other titles.
I don't think Fortnite is a good example of Epic "knowing what they're doing".
The game was stuck in development hell for many years during the closed betas and they really didn't seem to know how to fix the game (it took them 6 years to release the primary game mode as "early access", which it is still labelled as). It never really took off until a small part of the team spent less than 2 months on replicating PUBG's battle royale mode into the game as an experiment. That's not really "knowing what to do", that's more some kind of luck or serendipity.
I'd argue it's a lot more than somewhat derivative.
The game mechanics are a direct rip-off of Player Unknown Battlegrounds, except more 'kid friendly.' The only notable differences are being cartoonish and the addition of a building system (which looks a whole lot like the one in Rust). Here is a side-by-side video of gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KN6_Ibxnpk.
Their main source of income is selling in-game emotes like dances, which are all stolen without paying any royalty to their creators.
Which was a ripoff of h1z1, which was a ripoff of day z, which was a ripoff CoD zombies, which was a ripoff of battlefield, which was a ripoff of quake, which was a ripoff of doom, etc., etc.
Probably missing a bunch of steps but you get the picture.
The building system in Rust is a lot like H1Z1, but it is very different from Day-Z. Rust and H1Z1 differ in that Rust is not a zombie survival game, unlike the original (now discontinued) version of H1Z1. Coincidentally Fortnite was originally designed as a zombie survival game and shifted to battle royale late in development, much like H1Z1.
COD Zombies doesn't have building other than at specific points where you could reinforce barricades.
At the time the first COD Zombies game mode was released (Call of Duty: World at War) Battlefield did not yet have a barricading system (like it does now) or any sort of wave-based survival mode.
Quake is a deathmatch shooter, Battlefield is a tactical shooter. Very little resemblance.
Quake was made by the same people as Doom.
My point is that Fortnite copies very much from PUBG. I didn't make any arguments about whether that is acceptable or precedented.
I think this argument is silly tbh. Are we going to say no games can have a zombie mode or team deathmatch because games have done it before? Battle royale is basically free for all game mode but with a persistent death mechanic which has been around since the dawn of gaming - the idea that it can be ripped off rather than just iterated on doesn't hold for me
The one thing Fortnite did do better than everyone was getting mobile to work well. F2P, good mobile controls, and the community of streams is what made Fortnite take off.
Fortnite is a really well made game, I've never had any issues with the core gameplay/ game engine. Less consistent than CS:GO, but more consistent than siege (A game with a very very strong "competitive" contingent)
I don't feel Warcraft is a fair comparison at all because with an MMO you have significantly more invested in your character than anything in fortnite. We are talking thousands of hours of invested. Many players have hundreds of days played (meaning a full 24 hours per day).
That all resets about once a year when a new expansion gets out.
You invest into fortnight the same as you invest in anything, you specialize your skill for this one game, your social circle revolves around it etc. You don't need gear to invest in a game
Gear does, true. But there is a lot more personal attachment to an account than gear. There are achievements, mounts, pets, guilds, social connections/friends, etc... Also during it's peak the reset was much less of a thing (Wrath was the first expansion that started the gear reset per tier trend and it was also the peak of the games player count).
These days there's a soft reset every 5-6 months when a new raid tier comes out rather than only once per expansion. For the last few years they've tried hard to make it so that when someone who played years ago gets the urge to give it another try they can actually make it into the endgame content before that urge passes.
Fortnite isn't near/first of anything except the mix of existing motifs they mixed together and executed on exceedingly well. It's not a novel format like the first sandbox or rpg or fps or anything
Isn't Fortnite just the next evolution of Team Fortress 2? I think it's far more likely something replaces it than Fortnite is the king of free to play online battle games indefinitely.
I'd say Overwatch is a closer analogue to being the next evolution of TF2 than Fortnite is, from a purely gameplay perspective (the two games have very similar game modes from point control/king of the hill to "Cart pushing" along with the class/hero/trait based characters).
I think the commentor meant in regards to both being the largest F2P shooters in their day. I disagree with that though because I see Fortnite capturing the more of the COD semi-casual crowd rather than the relatively more hardcore crowd TF2 captured.
Of course this is really generalized, but I can't imagine Drake playing TF2 back in its heyday.
I think the commentor meant in regards to both being the largest F2P shooters in their day.
That's fair, and if that's the case, I'd still say Overwatch has a better claim to that title (beyond the initial purchase price, anyway-but Blizzard routinely opens the game up for extended F2P periods).
What's going to be interesting to watch in the purely F2P arena is this newcomer Apex from EA. I tried it out last night and it has a lot of interesting features and motifs that seem to be a collection of all of these games; you've got the dedicated classes from TF2, the "hero" theme from overwatch and the overarching battle royale/last team standing from Fortnite, PUBG and others.
Fortnite definitely getting there, but competitive Overwatch is reaching StarCraft levels of intense (or what competitive StarCraft was in the 2000's), there was a team from Europe I think that won over a million dollars in an Overwatch pro match back in 2017, teams are getting sponsored[1], even ESPN-"the worldwide leader in sports"-is getting into broadcasting Overwatch matches[2].
None of this is to take anything away from what the team over at Epic is doing or to say anything less of Fortnite, for what it's worth. It's definitely a phenomenon in its own right, but there's serious amounts of money being moved around for competitive OW gaming.
I think having 100 players play one actual realtime game well is unprecendented technical achievement and Fortnight in relation to it is similar for me as iPhone is in relation to actually working capacitive touch screen.
In the world of games, being free (legally or otherwise) is pretty much requirement of exorbitant organic popularity.
The original Starseige:TRIBES let you play with up to 128 players. It was okay on dialup but my 10down/1up cable connection gave me consistent pings under 30. That was in 1999.
> MAG used a new server architecture[8] to support online battles with up to 256 players
H1Z1 could, I believe, support 200-250 characters. PUBG superseded it with 100 players, then came Fornite. Arma 3 (2013), which housed the predecessor mod to PUBG, has a max player count of 255 IIRC.
In short, while it's important to have lots of players, I suspect it's not a large part of why Fortnite was successful.
Fortnite wasn't the first 100+ player battle royale game by a long shot, so it's not unprecedented. I love Epic Games but they definitely jacked the entire concept from PUBG and others.
I think a lot of people seem to gloss over how much of an effect being free had on capturing far more market share than any paid title did before it. It doesn’t matter if fortnite was or wasn’t the first 100+ player battle royals game.
Gamers like to discuss the mechanics and gameplay and who copied who but all of this misses the major point- it was F2P first and foremost, in a category where there aren’t many if any free games, (+ was well executed, + multi-platform). But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.
If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)
I 100% agree that F2P was the key ingredient in this case and that's why Epic Games made the right call while PUBG Corporation is struggling to control bleed-out from almost two years of failed promises to fix some fundamental issues and bugs.
Instead, PUBG Corporation doubled down on extracting revenue and added lootboxes, a similarly broken mobile PUBG (yeah let's totally rewrite the game in another engine before we bother to fix the one we've got) and in-game cosmetic purchases.
This angered people twice as hard, because A) the sentiment surrounding in-game monetization with paid games and B) the fact that a free game had less buggy game logic and mechanics, while constantly adding new features and refining gameplay as it settles into its market.
> But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.
Not unprecedented. There were already F2P battle royales, they were just shitty and not marketed well.
> If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)
Ok, that's just not true. I mostly play paid games on mobile. F2P worked for Epic Games because the Battle Royale genre was exploding and they provided the path of least resistance to becoming part of the scene, but after things have died down people will end up gravitating to more niche expansions on the genre which refine the gameplay in ways they prefer. Don't take this one data point and form an entire conclusion. That's bad business.
I’d like to see some evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you mostly play premium titles, but I wasn’t making a claim that people like you don’t exist. The fact of the matter remains that F2P quality titles outperform in download numbers, and the majority of top apps in the App Store support this claim.
My apologies, I shouldn't have so starkly segued from that point into my own anecdata. I didn't mean to offer it as a valid datapoint but just as a subjective experience, which is useful in the sense that compiling a large repository of subjective experiences can reveal the general societal consensus around a topic.
I also misread your post a bit, and didn't fully understand the point you were trying to make. I agree that volume-wise, F2P outperforms but that's a given. I don't think that won't ever be true if we only look at the mass market as a whole. But once we start examining niche categories such as the competitive scene, I think this assumption becomes less accurate.
Too bad Starforge was abandoned. The multiplayer gameplay promised to be quite revolutionary but they never cleaned things up. You can build and you have to protect your base while others gather building supplies, and launch offensive strikes on the enemy's base. Honestly a really cool idea and more engaging and deep than a battle royale.
Well... I think that way of putting it is a little too simplistic.
> PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) [...] is based on previous mods that were created by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games, inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative direction.
> [...]
> Lead designer Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.
> I think having 100 players play one actual realtime game well is unprecendented technical achievement
It's really not; Delta Force: Land Warrior was doing 50 player multiplayer in 2000 and a number of games were doing 100+ within a couple years after that, and a few even before.
Factorio was able to put 400 people into one game, where the server was a Youtube streamer's home computer, a full year before Fortnite Battle Royale came out.
If you think putting 100 players in the same realtime game is an "unprecedented technical achievement" you simply have no idea of what you're talking about.
To save you reading: the article discusses and dismisses a lot of the hype of Fortnite exceptionalism, and the author's basis for "Fortnite is the Future" is that it's being used like Second Life, aka a social forum for people to hang out as much as for gaming.
I remember playing a lot of TF2 because it felt almost like socializing compared to 'better' games. I think open, but also somewhat selective (vote ban, mute) communication is the perfect app for our increasingly socially disconnected population. The game is not just the game anymore, it is the whole Arcade!
> "indeed, the speed with which Battle Royale launched suggests the mode was in development well before Save the World had even launched"
The author might be missing an important part of the history here.
PUBG and Fortnite both use the unreal engine.
Part of the development of the unreal engine during this time was related to adding features and performance improvements to the engine for a game like PUBG.
PUBG had many performance problems originally and they did not seem to have the technical ability or the access to make needed structural changes to the engine.
This means PUBG developers had to work with the unreal developers to improve PUBG. It's entirely possible that the unreal developers used fortnite and started converting it to a battle royale game at this time. They would've needed a similar kind of game for testing the engine changes internally.
The next logical step was to complete the fornite BR mode and release it.
Good for Epic games, questionable outcome for PUBG.
In a way, it is similar to Amazon basics knowing what third party products are popular and finding a way to put a cheaper clone in the marketplace.
Interesting article but I think it somewhat misrepresents Epic's history and overstates the extent to which they have primarily been an engine company.
Epic started as a pure games developer. They somewhat accidentally fell into the engine business on the back of Unreal but turned it into a major part of their business in a way that id did not despite similar interest in licensing the Quake engine around the same era. They always continued to develop their own successful games however (the article does at least mention Gears of War) and in the past were sometimes accused of being more focused on shipping their own games than supporting engine licensees.
They have always maintained a business model built both around successful in house games as well as successful games from licensees. In this regard they differ from a purely engine focused company like Unity who don't have in house titles only licensees and engines like Lumberyard that have neither.
And cloud based gaming streamed to a thin client will always be a dumb idea and will never succeed for similar reasons that thin clients in general never take off but more fundamental. Games require low latency and it it will always make sense to have significant compute on the client because physics.
Interesting time to release this article: EA just released their own battle royale game (Apex Legends), and 10 millions people already played the game in its first 72 hours[1]. Plus, the reviews seem to be unanimous about the quality of the game. It got 300,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch right now, vs. 140,000 for Fortnite[2].
Apex Legends is really good but it strikes me as more of a pubg-type game not fortnite.
The Penetration fortnite has had across ages 10-20 is almost surreal. Anecdote: I was playing Apex (and Siege, for balance...) and I can hear my friends younger brother playing fortnite with his friends - across the room -through the chat.
From someone who's been following gaming for 30 years let me tell you Its good, people like it for now, it'll be dwindled down in 2 years and something new will be the hotness.
One game always rises to the top for a few years. Minecraft was the previous one. I think it also has a lot to do with luck, people love to read too much into a single success story and try to replicate it (cargo culting). Most fail.
The revenue per user calculation in the article seems wrong. 200 million users, $318 million revenue per month = $18 per user and year, not $96. What am I missing?
question: what makes hanging out in fortnite different from hanging out in a popular new bar; and corollary : moving on to the new cool bar when it opens up?
I've played a bunch of fortnite last year, even spent a bit of money on some outfits and got a better mouse for builds - don't want to be a default ya'know ;).
It was "fun times" for sure - even met a few people I tried to play with regularly if I saw them online.
Ultimately, the fun factor sort of wore off....next.
For me it was the novelty of the experiences they added to the game. It keeps it very fresh, especially with friends. For example when they added the vehicles, it was hilarious and interesting for a bit. Then they added balloons, which amazingly could also be used to float the vehicles. It allows a lot of amusing creativity and makes the game fun even if you and your friends suck.
In my opinion it's a brilliant game because the Game combines a vast number of interesting mechanics from PUBG, Blackout and Fornite into a Free2Play game.
Not to mention that:
- is way faster to get into the game by being much more optimized.
- a typical game is between 15-25min, There are much less dead times when compared to PUBG and Fortnite
- The characters are fun and they bring an interesting approach to BR.
- The ping system is great. You don't need to explicitly use Voice communication. I've won a number of games without using Voice.
I've still yet to try it, but I've seen plenty of claims that it improves on the basic gameplay and fun by making teamwork with random players super easy.
I don't even know what to do with this comment. All multiplayers games are designed to be a third place, that's why they have groups that stay together between rounds, integrated voice chat, and friend systems. Multiplayer games have been designed to act as third places for ... a long, long time now.
> Epic has also built up another great and particularly hard to establish advantage: some 200MM+ registered user accounts.
I don't think that Fornite players as a group think that setting up a new user account is a big deal. Having an account is not a particularly big point of friction any more.
> Third is the threat posed by the shift to cloud-based gaming
do players actually want this? I've only heard that players want this from "thought leader", technology speculator types. Never in my thousands of hours of online gaming have I ever heard another player talk about this.
> they will be able to support Unity and other engines as well (interoperability will obviously be critical to any Metaverse and has long been a passion point of Sweeney’s).
this seems pretty divorced from technical and political reality.