> Fortnite wasn’t designed to be a Second Life-style experience, or even a digital “third place“; it became one organically.<p>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.<p>> Epic has also built up another great and particularly hard to establish advantage: some 200MM+ registered user accounts.<p>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.<p>> Third is the threat posed by the shift to cloud-based gaming<p>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.<p>> 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).<p>this seems pretty divorced from technical and political reality.
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.<p>It's success will not be emulated even if better games (Like; Apex Legends from Respawn/EA) come to the fore.<p>It's unwise to use their model because, like world of warcraft, it only really works once or for one incumbent.<p>Fortnite works because "it's fortnite", it's already successful as hell, any monetisation, even small amounts is enough to catapult it to profitability.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> "indeed, the speed with which Battle Royale launched suggests the mode was in development well before Save the World had even launched"<p>The author might be missing an important part of the history here.
PUBG and Fortnite both use the unreal engine.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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].<p>Curious to see what's the future of Fortnite now.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends/news/apex-legends-10-million-players" rel="nofollow">https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends/news/apex-legends-10-m...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/directory" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitch.tv/directory</a>
Theres been a wave of these articles and I think it's mainly due to the journalists having grown up and having children who play computer games.<p>In other words, it's a topic of the chattering clases trying to understand the youth.
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.
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?<p>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 ;).<p>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.