This is just wrong. The game became popular because its a pretty damn good game and quite fun. Yes, it is somewhat derivative but most things are. People forget that Epic is an old school titan of the gaming industry that pioneered a lot of what we see in FPS titles today. They know what they're doing, even if they lifted some inspiration from other titles.
I'd argue it's a lot more than somewhat derivative.
The game mechanics are a direct rip-off of Player Unknown Battlegrounds, except more 'kid friendly.' The only notable differences are being cartoonish and the addition of a building system (which looks a whole lot like the one in Rust). Here is a side-by-side video of gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KN6_Ibxnpk.
Their main source of income is selling in-game emotes like dances, which are all stolen without paying any royalty to their creators.
Probably missing a bunch of steps but you get the picture.
COD Zombies doesn't have building other than at specific points where you could reinforce barricades.
At the time the first COD Zombies game mode was released (Call of Duty: World at War) Battlefield did not yet have a barricading system (like it does now) or any sort of wave-based survival mode.
Quake is a deathmatch shooter, Battlefield is a tactical shooter. Very little resemblance.
Quake was made by the same people as Doom.
My point is that Fortnite copies very much from PUBG. I didn't make any arguments about whether that is acceptable or precedented.
Please read what I said and don't put words in my mouth.
They really nailed it.
You invest into fortnight the same as you invest in anything, you specialize your skill for this one game, your social circle revolves around it etc. You don't need gear to invest in a game
PUBG is almost intimidating, fortnite is the opposite.
Of course this is really generalized, but I can't imagine Drake playing TF2 back in its heyday.
That's fair, and if that's the case, I'd still say Overwatch has a better claim to that title (beyond the initial purchase price, anyway-but Blizzard routinely opens the game up for extended F2P periods).
What's going to be interesting to watch in the purely F2P arena is this newcomer Apex from EA. I tried it out last night and it has a lot of interesting features and motifs that seem to be a collection of all of these games; you've got the dedicated classes from TF2, the "hero" theme from overwatch and the overarching battle royale/last team standing from Fortnite, PUBG and others.
Fortnite definitely getting there, but competitive Overwatch is reaching StarCraft levels of intense (or what competitive StarCraft was in the 2000's), there was a team from Europe I think that won over a million dollars in an Overwatch pro match back in 2017, teams are getting sponsored[1], even ESPN-"the worldwide leader in sports"-is getting into broadcasting Overwatch matches[2].
None of this is to take anything away from what the team over at Epic is doing or to say anything less of Fortnite, for what it's worth. It's definitely a phenomenon in its own right, but there's serious amounts of money being moved around for competitive OW gaming.
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[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2019/02/08/overw...
[2]http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/24062274/overwatch-le...
TF2 -> Overwatch -> Apex Legends
In the world of games, being free (legally or otherwise) is pretty much requirement of exorbitant organic popularity.
Guess most people just did not experience games like these the way we both did.
It must have done well because I heard of it despite never playing it.
You can still download it to this day: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=14491...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAG_(video_game) (2010, Playstation 3)
> MAG used a new server architecture[8] to support online battles with up to 256 players
H1Z1 could, I believe, support 200-250 characters. PUBG superseded it with 100 players, then came Fornite. Arma 3 (2013), which housed the predecessor mod to PUBG, has a max player count of 255 IIRC.
In short, while it's important to have lots of players, I suspect it's not a large part of why Fortnite was successful.
Gamers like to discuss the mechanics and gameplay and who copied who but all of this misses the major point- it was F2P first and foremost, in a category where there aren’t many if any free games, (+ was well executed, + multi-platform). But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.
If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)
Instead, PUBG Corporation doubled down on extracting revenue and added lootboxes, a similarly broken mobile PUBG (yeah let's totally rewrite the game in another engine before we bother to fix the one we've got) and in-game cosmetic purchases.
This angered people twice as hard, because A) the sentiment surrounding in-game monetization with paid games and B) the fact that a free game had less buggy game logic and mechanics, while constantly adding new features and refining gameplay as it settles into its market.
> But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.
Not unprecedented. There were already F2P battle royales, they were just shitty and not marketed well.
> If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)
Ok, that's just not true. I mostly play paid games on mobile. F2P worked for Epic Games because the Battle Royale genre was exploding and they provided the path of least resistance to becoming part of the scene, but after things have died down people will end up gravitating to more niche expansions on the genre which refine the gameplay in ways they prefer. Don't take this one data point and form an entire conclusion. That's bad business.
> Don’t take this one data point
A little irony there ;)
I’d like to see some evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you mostly play premium titles, but I wasn’t making a claim that people like you don’t exist. The fact of the matter remains that F2P quality titles outperform in download numbers, and the majority of top apps in the App Store support this claim.
I also misread your post a bit, and didn't fully understand the point you were trying to make. I agree that volume-wise, F2P outperforms but that's a given. I don't think that won't ever be true if we only look at the mass market as a whole. But once we start examining niche categories such as the competitive scene, I think this assumption becomes less accurate.
> PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) [...] is based on previous mods that were created by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games, inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative direction.
> [...]
> Lead designer Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Risi...
It's really not; Delta Force: Land Warrior was doing 50 player multiplayer in 2000 and a number of games were doing 100+ within a couple years after that, and a few even before.
It's success will not be emulated even if better games (Like; Apex Legends from Respawn/EA) come to the fore.
It's unwise to use their model because, like world of warcraft, it only really works once or for one incumbent.
Fortnite works because "it's fortnite", it's already successful as hell, any monetisation, even small amounts is enough to catapult it to profitability.
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.
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.