The original Starseige:TRIBES let you play with up to 128 players. It was okay on dialup but my 10down/1up cable connection gave me consistent pings under 30. That was in 1999.

Indeed. Thinking about Battlefield 1942, there were servers with 128 players, lots of vehicles and it ran perfectly fine.

Guess most people just did not experience games like these the way we both did.

Ahead of it's time I guess... Internet and gaming weren't enough of a thing back then for anything exorbitant.

It must have done well because I heard of it despite never playing it.

Yup, that or my personal favorite Subspace where you had a couple hundred players on 56k and everything was pretty snappy.

Subspace:Continuum ate up SO much of my time in middle school, I think it was my first experience with online gaming. Great times.

You can still download it to this day: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=14491...

Adding some extra data points in addition to covercash's:

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 PUBG superseded it with 100 players, then came Fornite.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.

Fortnite wasn't the first 100+ player battle royale game by a long shot, so it's not unprecedented. I love Epic Games but they definitely jacked the entire concept from PUBG and others.

I think a lot of people seem to gloss over how much of an effect being free had on capturing far more market share than any paid title did before it. It doesn’t matter if fortnite was or wasn’t the first 100+ player battle royals game.

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)

I 100% agree that F2P was the key ingredient in this case and that's why Epic Games made the right call while PUBG Corporation is struggling to control bleed-out from almost two years of failed promises to fix some fundamental issues and bugs.

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.

> Ok, that’s just not true. I...

> 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.

My apologies, I shouldn't have so starkly segued from that point into my own anecdata. I didn't mean to offer it as a valid datapoint but just as a subjective experience, which is useful in the sense that compiling a large repository of subjective experiences can reveal the general societal consensus around a topic.

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.

The only reason I like fornite is the building + fighting. It instantly made the game click in a way no game has since quake 2.

Too bad Starforge was abandoned. The multiplayer gameplay promised to be quite revolutionary but they never cleaned things up. You can build and you have to protect your base while others gather building supplies, and launch offensive strikes on the enemy's base. Honestly a really cool idea and more engaging and deep than a battle royale.

Did you play Action Quake 2? That's probably my favorite online FPS experience along with Quake I Team Fortress.

And PUBG jacked the idea from DayZ

Well... I think that way of putting it is a little too simplistic.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayerUnknown's_Battlegrounds

Lol no... it was based on an earlier mod by the same developer.

Just to add to the others, JOTR[1] had 150 player servers in 2004, with highly concentrated fighting areas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Risi...

I played the shit out of that demo for months.

> I think having 100 players play one actual realtime game well is unprecendented technical achievement

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.

Factorio was able to put 400 people into one game, where the server was a Youtube streamer's home computer, a full year before Fortnite Battle Royale came out.

Battlefield did it before with higher tick rate + physics / vehicles.

If you think putting 100 players in the same realtime game is an "unprecedented technical achievement" you simply have no idea of what you're talking about.