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.
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.
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.
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.
