THE MAKING OF BATTLE ROYALE: HOW FORTNIGHT GAINED POPULARITY AND WHAT BATTLE ROYALES ARE MISSING

Even thoughFortnight‘s popularity dropped slightly in 2019 , that didn’t stop it from earning $1.8 billion. How did Epic Games manage to develop a game that made it to the top?

The answer seemed to lie on the surface, and only children play the game, but that’s not the case.

A 2019 study found that 47% of Fortnight’s audience is over the age of 25. With 53% showing incredible loyalty and devotion, ignoring the other battle royals.

For comparison:

• Apix has 24% loyal players.
• PUBG, 18%.

Epic Games: from origins to Fortnight

Epic Games was founded in 1991 by Tim Sweeney, who had no plans to go into game development. The first name of Epic was Potomac Computer Systems.

When Sweeney started the company, he was still learning and mastering Pascal. As an exercise, I wrote a game, ZZT, which unexpectedly became popular. He was selling 3 or 4 copies a day. Without thinking about how to create his own game, Tim was making $100 every day.

Sweeney started a Shareware project: at the request of customers, he burned games onto floppy disks and mailed them. Tim realized that there was money to be made from games.

Renaming the company to Epic MegaGames, Sweeney took up game development. Without asking how to create a play, he acted.

By the way, the ZZT was on sale until 2013.

In the 90’s Epic hadn’t yet “found” authenticity, hadn’t thought about what kind of game to create, was doing everything.

Among the company’s projects were:

• platformers;
• fighting games;
• pinball and baseball simulators.

The search for “its place” in the market continued until Epic released Unreal. The game was interesting for the engine – the first iteration of the Unreal Engine. In an interview, Suina revealed that he wrote 90% of the engine code himself. And this technology was a breakthrough.

The engine used volumetric fog and 16-bit colors for the first time. John Carmack himself said that Unreal divided games into “before” and “after”.

But the cherry on the cake in Unreal Engine is the distribution model. Even before the game’s release, which was in 1998, Epic began the process of licensing the engine (1996). By the end of 1999, at least 16 games from other companies (Deus Ex, Duke Nukem Forever, and others) utilized Epic’s technology.

As stated above, Sweeney did not set out to develop games. He wanted to build a business. So I channeled my energies into the development of the company. By the fourth iteration, Unreal Engine had become a successful commercial engine.

Today, Epic is valued at $15 billion. Epic’s engine is used not only in games but also in movies, which makes the company profitable.

After the release of Unreal, the company’s reputation for dystopian games for male audiences was cemented for many years.

Epic: rebirth

Breaking the pattern with gamers happened in 2011 when Epic presented the Fortnight – a survival game similar to Disney and Pixar cartoons.

As Tim said, the product was based on two popular genres – angular universe like Minecraft and horror like Left 4 Dead.

Sweeney didn’t plan to release only dystopian games, and saw every single project as a new business opportunity. But there was another reason for Fortnight ‘s release – an update.

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After the Microsoft scandal, Epic decided to reposition itself, expand its target audience and look for ways to communicate directly with them. Now the company not only creates games, but also releases them on every possible platform. Sweeney’s new focus is service games.

And at that moment, a new, attractive multiplayer format – battle royal – shot into the world, which fit perfectly with the concept of Fortnight.

Interesting on the blog: Developing a profitable and simple game

Battle royal mechanics

The mechanics of battle royal – closed space on which turns out to be several dozen players. The goal is to survive at all costs through the available survival strategies.

The first top game that mastered battle royal was Minecraft, where several scenarios with “battles” are still available.

The battle royal was invented by Brendan Green, a game designer at Bluehole, a South Korean company that provided the capital and resources to develop and release the game PUBG, a 2017 hit with 30 million downloads. The game was released on Epic’s engine, UE 4.

Up until this point, the key concept behind Fortnight was the Save The World mode – gathering resources and fending off monster attacks. The success of PUBG’s battle royal format led Epic to change the concept of the Fortnite universe to free-to-play monetization, and the company has benefited from it.

To develop the game, for the first time, Epic brought in a third-party investor, China’s Tencent Corporation, which bought a 40% stake in the company for $330 million in 2012.

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Pumping everyone up: reasons for Fortnite’s mega-popularity

1. Speed. The main reason for Fortnight’s popularity is thetimely niche of “battle royale” in 2017. While others were looking around, Epic took action and in just 3 months created a game that garnered a multi-million user audience within days of release.
2. New content. The speed of Fortnight updates is staggering. Many can’t keep up with Epic, who every few months add global changes to the game: new mechanics, map updates, and more. In one of the latest versions, they applied a PVE element – a map that shows enemy facilities where you can steal powerful weapons. On top of that, there are small but noticeable content changes every few days, which keeps the audience from getting cold feet and shifting their attention to other games. For example, fishing and boating elements.
3. Technical Capabilities. Fortnight is less demanding on device specs, launches from all gadgets, and performs orders of magnitude better than most premium games.
4. Free-to-play format. Users can try the game for free, evaluate its advantages and, if desired, pump characters with paid “plushies”.

Disadvantages of battle royal: “battle royals” in the cutscene

1. Lack of User Generated Content (content created by players). Some game designers have criticized the battle royale genre for its lack of player-created content. And we’re not talking about maps and mods here, we’re talking about metagame. Like Hearthstone, for example. When the game came out, players didn’t know how to play and strategized on their own, learning the specifics of heroes, powers, and more. Meta is an opportunity for individuality to emerge. Like in Dota, Counter-Strike, and other games.
2. Surface Mechanics. The battle royale genre involves a stream of quickly digestible information that requires minimal effort to process. This negatively affects the games mechanics, which can’t be made deeper. Because of this, players figure out in less than a day which weapons are more powerful and useful, and how to kill the enemy with minimal casualties.
3. The player relies on luck. The core skill of Battle Royale is the ability to shoot quickly and accurately, whereas in games like Counter-Strike, shooting skill is one of a thousand things needed to win.
4. Genre Crisis. “Battle Royale” requires constant updates to keep the audience engaged. And often changing content requires too many resources that, other than Epic, are available to few. And even putting the production of content on the conveyor belt, sooner or later you can face the lack of ideas, which can cause the loss of part of the audience.

Despite the nuances, the gaming industry is a tidbit that attracts prospects.

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