I seem to remember at the time that Unreal Tournament was felt to be a pivot that surprised a lot of people, very similarly to Fortnite. Unreal 1 was a very traditional FPS game focused heavily on single player storytelling. It was an interesting, wild risk at the time for Epic to release a multi-player only game in the series, that seemed to pay off for them pretty well (the original UT ended up outselling Unreal by a lot, if I recall). Admittedly there were signs that that was where the FPS genre was going (Q3A released only a month later). "Who would buy an FPS without a single player campaign?"

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'm saying that at this point I think Fortnite is effectively a fluke, Minecraft-style, the right game at the right time.

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.