Will Fortnite Die?
Why Fortnite is unique?
If you’ve played Fortnite for any significant amount of time, you know that Epic Games, Fortnite’s designers, and developers, release new content for the game persistently. Do you think Fortnite will ever die? It is a different story that Fortnite is still in the beta mode and will never come out of that. It’s usually in the form of a new item, a vaulted item that they added back, emotes, skins, music, or a new game mode. Fortnite is constantly being changed on many different fronts practically all the time. Because I don’t think Fortnite will die soon. Unless Epic Games mess with Fortnite.
Fortnite is one of the most popular video games on the planet. It was released in 2017 and had a slow first year. The game eventually picked up pace in 2018 and 2019 when it came on track to become one of the biggest battle royale games. The game has since seen an exponential rise in the user base when they organized Fortnite WorldCup with the prize pool of 15M USD.
53% of Fortnite’s user demographic is between the age of 10–25. Is the rapid iteration of new ideas what makes Fornite popular with younger audiences? Is it funny dances? The catchy songs? The “thank the bus” feature? Is it the PC players who build so quickly that their sweat from trying so hard stops California from having another drought? Why is this game popular? What is this game?
So what makes it different than other games?
Fortnite is a video that game that has grown to 350 million players in a quick time frame. It has a massively scaled cross-platform capability that lets console, PC, and mobile players play with each other simultaneously.
The game has licensing agreements with other pop/cultural icons and has featured creative “outside the box” ideas for related game events, using the John Wick series, Marshmello, Travis Scott the Avengers, and other relevant media to make the game more engaging. Live events in every season end, Story in Battle Royale who the heck does this?
They also introduced the concept of a Battle Passes and V-bucks. Fortnite is free to play, but if you’d like, you can buy a Battle Pass which levels you up quicker and gets you more skins, emotes, and music. However, these Battle Pass items are purely aesthetic; meaning that just because you spend money on the game, doesn’t mean it’ll make you better. This prevents people from buying their way to winning.
Most importantly, it’s user experience is INSANE. Fortnite has been known to integrate User Experience Research into their game design, and it shows. Where PUBG’s UI has smaller elements and text, Fortnite has larger icons, text, but also more intuitive prompts (but can have some bugs). People like me, can play PUB-G and get motion sickness. This is the main reason why people like me are not interested in PUBG but love to play Fortnite 6 hours a day.
Fortnite has a lot of unique elements that feel very human. Whether it be the funny dances, the user research, the Twitch / Youtube / Facebook streamers, the media partnerships, or even thanking the bus driver, Fortnite has a sense of humor and talent at comical entertainment that has overshadowed other Battle Royale games, and will probably continue to do so in the future. Content Creators are the reason why Fortnite is unique.
Fortnite won’t die:
1) It’s free to play, unlike prominent competitors and you can build in this game LOL.
Free-to-play (FTP) games have become much more popular, especially given the success of Fortnite, which is free to download, and then you can purchase in-game items via microtransactions. Fortnite has advanced this business model for game creators across PC/Console/Mobile by creating an in-game economy that users saw value in. They also were able to monetize without creating a Pay-To-Win (performance advantages) dynamic and keeping all microtransactions centered around cosmetic items.
(Skins, Emotes, Music will not improve you if you buy, it is just for yourself and SHOWOFF)
2) This Battle Royale has a story, which leads to events at the end of the season.
Epic Games — Creator of Fortnite, make sure to keep Fortnite fresh through events and new seasons. While events are typically in-game events that happen every once in a while, the seasons not only have begun to have themes but also some have had details in the map slowly change throughout the season — this amounts to “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out) because not playing for a couple of days, or a week, could mean missing out on the in-game event.
3) Strong game developer support (bi-weekly constant updates)
Fortnite schedules updates to the game on a bi-weekly basis (If a fix is necessary they can also push out a “hotfix”). This allows them to respond quickly to the community’s requests, bugs in the game, game dynamic adjustments, and much more. In the past, if a game had an issue then the gamer would likely abandon the game, knowing that an update wasn’t technically possible.
With the rise of internet gaming & connectivity, games like Fornite can release a patch/update on a regular basis in order to keep the gamer’s experience as optimal as possible. In return, Fortnite has chosen to monetize via microtransactions vs an upfront download cost (PUBG is $30 is play and they also have microtransactions).
4) Live Event: Who the heck crash their servers every season end ? and arrange world-class In-Game Live Concerts.
Travis Scott Live Event In Fortnite
Running a Live Service game is all about establishing direct communication with your players. To truly captivate your audience, you need to be able to control the pacing of the content so your game is always fresh, and players keep coming back.
Experiences that take inspiration from Minecraft and Fortnite concerts will no doubt catapult the world of virtual music and entertainment to the next level (both in terms of immersion and adoption).
5) User-generated content is constantly unique & new.
User-generated content is, quite literally, free advertising. Fortnite is arguably one of the best examples of a game built for user-generated content and this is something I believe is at the core of Fortnite’s success. Games like PUBG, BO4, and Apex Legends have only had limited success in user-generated content as it starts to become repetitive. This is also directly correlated to the lack of updates that add new dimensions and play-styles to the game. Since Fortnite is always changing the map, adding new items, and different Limited-Time Mode’s (LTMs), there is always new content to create.
6) If Apex and Valorant didn’t kill it, what will?
Every game is going to be hyped when it is first released, especially games that have marketing budgets that are being used to pay streamers to play the game. This needs to be clearly understood so we can move forward as a community and understand that just because you don’t like one game as much as another doesn’t mean that the game is dead.
Also, the community wouldn’t look at each as a competitor, but more of a co-existence (i.e. Pepsi vs Coke). This doesn’t mean they can’t compete with each other over each individual gamer, but the community opinion shouldn’t be based on a game’s ability to force another game to shut down.
Competing games are better for the ecosystem because with each update for one game requires the competing titles to either follow suit or try to build out their own version of the update. This is extremely prevalent in the Apex vs Fortnite vs Valorant competition. Please share your views on will Fortnite die?
Conclusion:
First and foremost, the success of a game should never depend on its ability to ‘kill’ another game. That said, I see no end in sight for Fortnite due to a truly differentiated gamer experience that transcends every demographic and offers unique user-generated content compared to other shooters and battle royale games.
You can come back after taking a break for weeks or months and the game feels fresh. Few other games have the developer support to continually push out updates and quick fixes to the game’s issues. Epic Games has built a developer-gamer relationship that makes the gamers feel appreciated and listened to — this is how you build a healthy gaming community. What is most important is building a complete gaming ecosystem that doesn’t rely on one game reigning supreme, but instead relying on many different games that keep the ecosystem interesting and offering totally different experiences, even within the same genres. More let us know what do you think will Fortnite Die?
Our review on other games: here
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