Unity has done an incredible job of making game development accessible. So much so that when I wanted an extra 30 days on their trial period, I reached out over Skype and was answered within minutes by the founder (who was CEO at the time) and issued a new license key.
Unreal adapted to that market change - they didn't do it half-assed either, they did it properly and with conviction. Their success with Fortnite isn't a one-off, it's come from an astute market awareness and adaptability.
The fact that they turned this fund into reality so quickly is exactly why Fortnite and the Unreal engine is a success.
It's impressive that they managed to build that Battle Royale mode so quickly and efficiently (although obviously it was helped by the fact that they could build on top of their pre-existing Fortnite game) but I think you're downplaying the luck factor. Or rather, if you don't think it's a one-off, do you really think that they will be able to replicate this level of success "at will" in the future?
And if so, why didn't they have the same amount of success and "market awareness" in the past? Remember Paragon?
>Paragon was a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game developed and published by Epic Games. Powered by their own Unreal Engine 4, the game started pay-to-play early access in March 2016, and free-to-play access to its open beta started in February 2017.[1] Epic Games shut down its servers on April 27, 2018.
I definitely think that the Fortnite people were at the right place at the right time, they saw an opportunity and jumped on it. They saw PUBG had great potential but was struggling to deliver a polished multiplatform experience. They had this brand new Fortnite game that they could mod a BR mode into relatively easily. They released it on platforms where PUBG was not available and on top of that they released it for free. It's clever but this particular combination of events do not occur every month.
Some companies will have spectacular failures as well as spectacular successes. Successful companies are able to learn from both and iterate.
Unreal and Unreal Tournament were absolute block busters that paved the way for Fortnite, just as Paragon did. You wouldn't have arrived at Fortnite without first going through the ups and downs that preceded it.
By your logic, a company can only be considered successful if they never make mistakes, which is a severely flawed position.
I don't really consider Unreal and UT because, while they were definitely successful and I personally love UT, they're the product of a different time. The last truly successful UT was in 2004 (UT3 in 2007 didn't have quite the same long-lasting appeal and even that was 12 years ago!). There's also Gears of War that was quite popular on consoles but again, a completely different formula and nothing remotely close to what Fortnite is achieving today.
Gears too seemed to lead the pack on pulling together various gaming trends ahead of a lot of its competition. Cover-based Shooter wasn't its own "genre" until Gears (even admitting that fad may have passed, Gears was pretty central to the fad). Gears was also ahead of the pack in adding things like tower-defense elements to FPS/3PS multiplayer (Horde mode).
That's before you take into account their pre-Unreal successes, too. Epic had some big hits in the Shareware era that are perhaps more interesting pivots simply because of how much tougher distribution and sales were in that era.
Anyway, Epic seems to have a sample size greater that "striking gold once", for whatever it is worth.
I mean, that literally describes every innovation. Luck is always part of the equation, you're just assuming luck was a bigger part of the equation than most people do, and I'd argue you have little evidence to support that position.
It's not a binary. If I can consistently roll a 6 on a die at 1/4 probability, I'm still doing _something_ based on skill, in aggregate, while the outcome of any given roll is still largely being governed by chance.
> It's clever but this particular combination of events do not occur every month.
Adaptability isn't about _making_ the opportunity. It's about having enough flexibility to capitalise on it when it presents itself.
First of all, they weren't the first in the battle royale market. Many similarly styled games came before. Why hasn't PUBG, despite its absolute success, attained the relative success of Fortnite, which is likely driving 100x or more revenue? What about the many games or mods before PUBG?
In Epic's case, a big reason is the infrastructure. PUBG is a pretty bad game, from a technical sense. It runs like crap on PC, and the console ports are even worse. Comparatively, though not bug free, Fortnite is one of the most optimized, beautiful, performant AAA games out there.
They have in-house expertise with their engine. This is the difference between DICE making a technically amazing game like BF1 with Frostbite, then handing that exact same engine to the Bioware Montreal team to make Mass Effect Andromeda and getting that hot mess of a game. You can't just see a market trend like "oh battle royale games are popular" then become Fortnite. Their investment into the Unreal Engine helped make it possible.
And that's not including the investment into Save the World, which probably wasn't alone an investment that would have shown returns. But it made Fortnite BR possible. Game companies make poor performing games sometimes. That doesn't mean they're bad developers, or that they are "lucky" when they have a success. Their ability to identify that they could take the foundations laid by StW and capitalize on the battle royale market trend is nothing short of marketing genius, because its not immediately obvious from playing StW, specifically the building mechanics, that it would work well as a battle royale game. None of them had building before fortnite.
Ok, so they made a good game. Do you have any idea the engineering expertise that's necessary to scale a game like Fornite to the 8.3M concurrent players it experiences at peak? Fortnite is the most popular video game of all time, period. And, oh by the way, it's an online game with 100 player lobbies, real-time competitive-grade player interaction, and matchmaking within seconds. That's not easy. That's not "luck". And if they'd stumbled when they started achieving some small levels of success, people would have left. They didn't. [1]
Luck has almost nothing to do with it. They didn't get lucky that they had an amazing engine and a game like StW to build on top of; those things were the result of a decade of amazing engineering. They didn't get lucky when they scaled from 500k concurrent players to 8M in a period of months. There isn't more than a dozen people in the world reading this who have experienced scale that dramatic, and even if you had, probability states that you would have failed, and even if you hadn't, you're probably not working in an industry with customers as fickle and shitty as video gaming. Epic succeeded, and that's a testament to incredible engineering, planning, forethought, and likely some very late nights, missed sleep, and sacrificed time with loved ones.
They're successful because they're smart and they're hard working, not because they won the lottery.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/EPICGames/
> Why hasn't PUBG, despite its absolute success, attained the relative success of Fortnite, which is likely driving 100x or more revenue?
PUBG has had a following almost despite itself. The performance is terrible, the game assets are bland and most are store-bought, and the development behind it is incredibly slow. People played PUBG with conviction for, what, 6 months to a year?, before Fortnite showed up and started peeling players away. And when they launched on the Xbox, you couldn't use the same account that you had on the PC--which was a pretty big slap in the face for a game whose only rewards are collectable aesthetics.
While they're both technically the same genre, PUBG is slower and more methodical while Fortnite has quicker matches on the jump (if that's what you want), a more light hearted and original approach to style, and, of course, the building aspect.
On top of that, they were professional.
They released content on a regular schedule, with seasons and the season pass being something you could understand. They fix issues pretty quickly, and the game runs smooth. Plus the fact that it's not as intimidating as the gritty, slow pace of PUBG means there's likely a smaller barrier of entry.
The team behind Fortnite churn out good work, and I think the community sees and appreciates that. The game feels healthy and growing, rather than stuck in a perpetual 'alpha' phase that PUBG is still in.
Fortnite is fundamentally much younger and less serious.
This may well differ quite a bit in other markets.
Also the narrative that PUBG is "under-performing crap" is only justified in the context that its a 100 player 8x8KM map. It performs better than basically all the other games that have tried to enter that arena with the partial exception of Fortnite. Except Epic wrote the engine (that PUBG is using) and they optimised it a lot for PUBG already and optimised Fortnite alot which PUBG then benefited from.
Planetside 2 has 8km x 8km maps with up to 2k players, with occasionally hundreds in the same fight. It's not a marvel of performance, but it's definitely better at it than PUBG.
Luck provided them with the opportunity, but their ingenuity is what let them take advantage of it and capitalise on it.
Besides, Unity clearly stated that Improbable knew about their TOS violation for at least half a year and Unity's reasoning also makes some sense, as Improbable is bundling Unity's SDK in their product. Problem is, that it's too late now because Improbable blew this up from their perspective omitting important information about what was actually going on.
As an analogy, I have the right to live anywhere I want in my country (where I live is a free choice), that doesn’t mean I can afford to actually do so.
Saying that Unity is wrong because they have complex licensing is just as misguided as saying that Epic is wrong because they charge royalties. Should Unity invest $25 million into a fund for "royalty-free game engines"?
That's a bit dishonest, when they say "you need an additional license" for cloud platforms they mean a custom license that has to be directly negotiated with Unity, it not just something you can click and buy; meaning no transparency and pretty much a closed door.
Until we know more I'm hitting the popcorn.
I also didn’t say Unity is in the wrong, necessarily.
? Hasn’t Epic always been quite mod/dev/indie friendly, giving away the Unreal SDK for free, publishing is free for non-commercial projects and as long as you weren’t an AAA dev/publisher you ‘only’ had to pay 5% of your profits once you made over $100.000
> Once you ship your game or application, you pay Epic 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter.
epic had a fine licensing scheme before with udk which was modernised along with the market. as well as the additional services they now provide. without these services and the quality of games they produce they would have no fortune. They realise, in the market, you need to keep growing or go bust, so further developments and improvements are made. its not dishonest or unfair - tried running a business lately?
Please enlighten us as to why selling software is worse than giving it away for "free", then changing the definition of "free".
I find that a bit dishonest tbh. Epic clearly sees the opportunity to gut punch it's competitor and use it to their advantage and lure devs away from Unity while getting good press in the process. Not so long ago Epic was selling their Engine for hundreds of thousands of USD while Unity was already way more accessible to indie devs. They are insanely rich from Fortnite fame right now, so for them this is peanuts.