Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past.
I'd like to stake out two wins that define Fortnite's success, to me:
1. It's on every platform that matters, with crossplay.
That's hitherto largely unheard of for games; which is mostly a result of budget restrictions, middleware licensing, and partner contract limitations.
2. Its store combines time-limited access, games of chance, and vanity. You have to keep playing and keep spending in order to look how you want, and how you want to look is coerced to be ever changing by the continual churn of the store.
While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with lots of players in fast-paced multiplayer. To make matters even more complicated, the players can build large structures in real time. The game also features a large amount of interactable objects with no loading screens. You could say that games like Minecraft do that, but those are graphically much simpler.
I haven’t played Fortnite, but this sounds (at least partially) like Battlefield 2 about 15 years ago — huge 64 player maps with fast paced action. I remember at the time being amazed that I could fly jets and helicopters, drive tanks, or just scurry around on foot all in one game. I played many, many hours of that.
The base game did not have building or many interactive objects but there were a couple of custom mods that did.
I get where you're coming from and it is an evolution in it, but Fortnite does have more players per map. And the map is a lot bigger. The interactable objects and building is what make it quite different technically.
With games where building stuff is just tacked on, you'll find that performance drops very quickly after just a few hundred objects are placed. This limits building significantly. The interactive objects point is also something that wasn't too common until recently (past few years). Skyrim had loading screens to go indoors so that they could have a lot of interactable objects indoors. If you went and put the objects from a few houses together then the game's performance dropped significantly.
You are a bit out-of-touch in games if you're comparing a 9 year old game like Skyrim when saying Fortnite is revolutionary.
You missed the Day-Z mod for Arma 3 (released 2013), H1Z1 popularised the battle royale genre before shooting itself in the foot, and of course PUBG picking up the baton.
As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved.
Fortnite's not even got particularly complicated building compared to many of those other games.
The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from hats for over a decade! There's been jokes about it for years[1].
I'm not saying that Fortnite's not good, I'm not saying it's not a massive success, but revolutionary or innovative it was not. This puff piece is obviously written by a someone who hasn't got a clue about games.
You can even argue that they took a failed game's assets and cobbled together a battle-royale shooter and, almost accidentally, became massively successful. Right place, right time. Overwatch did much the same thing. Several other companies failed doing exactly the same thing (e.g. Battleborn, H1Z1)
Valve itself hasn’t figured out it’s money making strategy in games so I’m not sure why you’re patting them on the back for supposedly cracking the code that Epic supposedly copied (see: Artifact). They’ve had to also backtrack on their item auctioning ambitions due to money laundering issues with CSGO keys.
And games like League (not sure of Dota 2) and TF2 actually give you a slight advantage if you’re willing to pay. In TF2 different items will allow you to perform different attacks if you pay for them and MOBAs allow you to always play certain heroes if you pay for them. This is simply NOT the case with Fortnite and is more similar to Overwatch or CSGO in that regard.
In-game purchases are also different than standard loot boxes seen in other games as others have already mentioned. I won’t repeat myself but the key takeaway is 1) the game is 3rd person view so the perceived value of the cosmetic items is higher to the purchaser and 2) they’re NOT loot boxes.
I can really go on about their battle pass implementation vs the industry standard expansion packs or season passes (that games like COD MW or Apex have copied) or how they continue to innovate and significantly change the gameplay but your mind seems to have been made.
If someone comes in and combines the traits other games have but does it better than all of the rest while continuing to innovate, it is really just copying someone else’s strategy? Games like Arma 3 required mods and ones that “borrowed” the gameplay like PUBG and H1Z1 are clunky as hell to play and go for realism vs cartoon violence that Fortnite favors. Those three games are essentially interchangeable unlike Fortnite, which runs really well on everything but really just the Switch.
>As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved.
7 Days to Die is graphically nowhere near what Fortnite is. Rust had its official release in the same year as Fortnite and ARK was literally made with UE4. That is, the technology Epic used to build Fortnite was used by ARK.
>The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from hats for over a decade!
You're completely overlooking the part where Valve's initial idea for those games was to push Steam. That way even if the monetization strategy wasn't great it would pay off. Fortnite did not have such a plan initially (at least not that we know of). Valve also wasn't anywhere near first at making their games F2P and monetizing them with microtransactions. F2P games with microtransactions have been a part of Korean MMOs since the early 2000s. There were even private servers of other MMOs that essentially monetized in such a way.
You're not wrong that the battle-royale part of Fortnite was a second attempt at popularizing the game, but the tech to make Fortnite pushed UE4 forward quite a bit. Things like Distance Field Ambient Occlusion were things that might not have made it into the engine without Fortnite.
Rust (survival game) actually handles a lot of placeable elements in a huge map quite well, and the main focus of the game is PvP and strategic base-building.
Fortnite is more accessible being cross-platform and a more family-friendly (Rust has its share of naked people running on beaches/spawn points)
Fortnite doesn’t offer anything new, it is however very polished and accessible game with a good gaming loop that is easy to pickup but has enough depth to be hard to master.
It also runs rather well across a wide range of hardware and devices.
Tribes didn't support more players than other games of that time, didn't have a build system beyond placing turrets, had no special world interaction, and maps weren't _huge_ (and for competitive play, mostly short maps were in the rotation)
Getting a dozen people in and on a dropship in Tribes2 was a highlight of my LAN gaming days. Utter chaos. Superb fun. Too intricate a game for online play but great otherwise. Codename: Eagle hit similar notes.
Both these things came later on (once Fortnite took off).
What Epic actually did do well, was take the most popular game in the world at the time - PUBG, copy it to the T on their own engine, and release it for free (instead of the $20 PUBG cost). That alone made it the most popular game in the world, and allowed them to make money off it, and create ports on all available platforms.
Dota 2 has a similar store for cosmetics, but also includes the ability to sell them on the steam community market, giving Valve a 15% cut in addition to the money they made on the initial sale. People are willing to spend a lot of money gambling on $2.50 lootboxes for cosmetics that can be bought on the community marketplace for 3 cents the following year.
>Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past.
The best part is all the fruit of those learning and experience are now part of the Unreal Engine.
Thanks for ZZT Tim. That game changed my life when I was starting high school in the mid 90s; it was one of the ways I learnt to really have fun with computers as well as to program and make my own games.
Also, Unreal Tournament still holds a very fond place in my heart. I don't play games these days, but on the very rare occasion I feel like it, that's one of my major go-tos, just for the nostalgia of Facing-Worlds ;)
Seconded re ZZT. I remember learning HTML so that I could build my first website, which was a ZZT fan website (there were more). That game literally launched my career as a programmer.
My brother and I would sit at the computer for hours building elaborate 8-bit worlds fueled mainly by our imaginations.
I think the human race will rue the day it took the first step down the path to a metaverse. Fortnite has already show millions of parents how it's impossible to get their kids to disengage from a game which carries a high social cost of not being involved. The incentives are weighed heavily against individual choice and that can only lead to new forms of slavery.
> Sweeney isn’t quick to take all the credit for the mostly positive attention “Fortnite” has attracted, telling The Wall Street Journal his employees designed and programmed the game, not himself. Whatever his role, however, Epic has grown leaps and bounds under his leadership.
If it was his decision to make it free-to-play-but-not-pay-to-win, then a good deal of credit is his.
Tim Sweeney has been extremely kind and generous with his time in all my interactions with him dating back about 10 years ago. I wish him all the success in the world.
Him and Epic are getting a lot of hate on Reddit because of the exclusivity deals, but as a developer, I appreciate Epic trying to get the dev/store revenue split more generous for developers. Valve does the standard 70/30, and Epic is doing 88/12 I believe.
It isn't just the exclusivity deals, but the manner in which those deals are brought about, often with release promises broken, releases yanked and backers being outright lied to; I do not wish any success to such a business. As a gamer I don't like what the PC gaming landscape is turning into with Epic Games at the forefront of it. As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split, a big part of which is an ecosystem, platform and tooling.
All the extras like platform and tooling is nice, but don't mean anything if you can't support yourself as a dev. Better revenue sharing for devs is one thing that can make a big difference, provided the user base is there. Either it'll be there on Epic one day or Valve will match the revenue share of Epic or both. I'm all for having a competitive option in this space.
I don't think it's entirely Epic's fault about the releases being yanked from Steam or crowd sourced titles making changes. The developers had to sign the contract with Epic and Valve decided that they're too big to fail (which they might be by now) so they didn't try anything to counter.
The one thing that does suck from the gamer perspective is having to use multiple stores. As a dev and gamer I'm okay with this however as it helps the dev community at large in the long run if a viable store contender ever arrives.
> As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split
Rev split was the best thing to happen to the game industry. Previously, game engines required ridiculous six figure contracts to even get started and meant a fixed cost regardless of the success of the game. We've had no shortage of amazing games thanks to this arrangement.
Valve does a lot for the 30% and getting onto the front of the steam store page can make up to eighty percent of a titles revenue. Epic has a lot of work to do.
Personally, I think the best thing to come out of Fortnite is the revenue stream making it feasible for Epic to create its own game store and compete with Valve/Steam.
Steam had been pretty stagnant for years until EGS came along and started poaching exclusives (opinions of this tactic aside) and got them to finally improve their platform.
The main thing that Epic appears to be doing is taking a big pile of Chinese money and using it to bribe users with free games as a carrot to go along with their stick of exclusivity agreements.
Even that isn't really novel; EA's Origin store did the same thing, until they gave up on trying.
Change doesn't always mean for the better...
I think there is a desire to hate on steam and people point to fortnite as the creator of the epic store but steam has provided a reliable and secure platform for literally a decade plus while the epic store has had multiple breaches just this year alone and crashes quite often. The game itself is ok, it exists only because pubg couldn't fix their game though, that and the ability to play it across systems at any age, but to say it's a great game is kind of like saying McDonald's is a great resturant in that it's biggest appeal is that it's cheap, everywhere, and consistent...but that does not make it a great game in ant sense it just makes it a convenient game with market appeal and a payment system that works by getting thousands off of a hand full of people with expendable incomes or a serious problem.
Tl;DR he did alot of things but I don't really think he changed the game industry any more than league of legends or pubg.
Epic store is currently the turd of all game clients. I have a 1gbit connection and can download a 70gb game in 10m on steam. It took me 3 hours to download borderlands 3. I then copied it to my wife’s computer and epic... REDOWNLOADED ALL 63gb AGAIN... over 3 hours...
I have an Epic store account on one of my emails. Thing is, I didn’t create it but it’s a cheap Chinese turd that doesn’t validate emails. How can I trust them with my credit card then?
And incompetence aside, Tencent made all their money they now use to bribe for exclusives with free to play “games”. And I don’t mean the likes of Fortnite. I doubt they even know what a honest business deal is.
I can remember how Steam was getting shit in its early versions too. But if they would wait with the release until the product would be complete/perfect, they would never ship it. So taking the approach of Minimum Viable Product + adding features as they go feels reasonable to me, even for the price of imperfection (a temporarily one, hopefully).
When steam came out, there wasn't scalable cloud infrastructure, they didn't have literally billions of dollars, are there weren't any real expectations. Epic games pretty much has no excuse.
I don’t like arena games, but they have been popular for a while. From what you can’t avoid picking up from general gaming media, it’s a genre that has been plagued by companies who offered horrible support and user experienced.
It seems like Epic took the best bits of a popular formula and added a decent customer experience to it. Which, if I’m right, is a really nice message.
I know exactly what you mean, but it's okay. I don't know if there will be a game to fulfil people's dreams of "exactly like pubg but better" for a long time, if ever. Because it was made mostly by people who I believe had never made an FPS/shooter before, it has a lot of problems, but the people were also able to make exactly what they wanted. A lot of the things about pubg that people think are bad, like how "sluggish" movement feels compared to say, csgo, were deliberate design decisions. It takes a really long time to get anywhere near competent even if you're already used to big multiplayer FPSs. E.g. you have to pick up a weapon then pick up ammo then load it. Anyone who wants to clone PUBG will most likely end up making something with a less brutal learning curve because it takes so much time and resources to make such a thing. In short I think such an idiosyncratic, buggy game with such brutally unforgiving gameplay, massive maps, and realistic bullet physics/weapons becoming a hit was a one off. I tried Apex Legends but it is nothing like pubg really. Even since I was a kid, I haven't played anything that sucked me in like PUBG did in 2017. It's so realistic, variable, and engrossing, and it doesn't hold the player's hand at all. Just my opinion.
I'd like to stake out two wins that define Fortnite's success, to me:
1. It's on every platform that matters, with crossplay.
That's hitherto largely unheard of for games; which is mostly a result of budget restrictions, middleware licensing, and partner contract limitations.
2. Its store combines time-limited access, games of chance, and vanity. You have to keep playing and keep spending in order to look how you want, and how you want to look is coerced to be ever changing by the continual churn of the store.