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)
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.