6 ms·
> ...has popularized the battle royale category — think Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games — almost single-handedly... Almost single-handedly? This is a biza
by Reedx 8y ago
> ...has popularized the battle royale category — think Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games — almost single-handedly...
Almost single-handedly? This is a bizarre claim and it's like rewriting history.
- minimaxir 8y agoThis can be debated. Although Rust/H1Z1/PUBG were certainly popular battle royale games before Fortnite, Fortnite was the only one that brought it mainstream, outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem.
- jVinc 8y agoBattle royal was already popular enough for Epic to drop everything they had and shift focus to the genere without any doubt that it was the correct thing to do. To give them credit for the popularity of the genre is to rewrite history.
- earenndil 8y agoI disagree. PUBG was _insanely_ popular well before fortnite showed up.
- justwalt 8y agoRight. PUBG is still immensely popular with hundreds of thousands of steam players daily, and I believe it saw player growth in a recent month.
- chc4 8y agoI'm sorry? PUBG sold 50 million copies. It is the 5th highest selling game in history. You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.
- minimaxir 8y agoThat's why I added "outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem". PUBG was incredibly big yes, but parents weren't asking questions about their children's addiction to PUBG and talk shows didn't have long segments about PUBG. Fortnite became a place for people to hang out: https://twitter.com/anoopr/status/1071921080485457920 https://twitter.com/anoopr/status/1071921080485457920
- diminoten 8y agoI think it's hard for gamers to really appreciate what Fortnite is. It's a whole new thing, that's never happened before. It's bigger than Pacman, Pokemon, Mario, Tetris, Angry Birds, etc. My brother, a college football player, plays it. My sister, an Instagram addict and high schooler, plays it on her phone while shopping at, I dunno, Forever 21 I guess. This is new, and worth paying attention to.
- diminoten 8y agoCompared to Fortnite, 50 million isn't that much.
- brianwawok 8y ago
- subway 8y agoYou can even trace it back even earlier to Arma2 and DayZ (mod).
- alexeldeib 8y agoBesides PUBG, who else has done this in a successful way? Fortnite wasn’t the original but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point. I’m okay with “PUBG + Fortnite” ~= “almost single handedly”. I think the key word in that quote is popularized — even if earlier games did it, these are the two to demonstrate widespread appeal.
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoAlso worth pointing out that PUBG uses unreal, so Epic Games makes money off the royalties AND gets visibility into the PUBG sales data. It's very likely that seeing those numbers made Epic Games shift focus.
- jsnell 8y agoThe PUBG sales numbers were visible to everyone in realtime: during the heyday of PUBG Steamspy was still accurate, and the game was only being sold on Steam. Any visibility Epic got from the licensing revenue would have been irrelevant.
- ehsankia 8y agoThe order in video games, as far as I can make it was: Minecraft (hunger game mod) > DayZ/H1Z1 > PUBG > Fortnite At each step, the genre grew by 1 or 2 orders or magnitude. So while Fortnite is by far the largest BR game now, if you look at the log-graph, they each had an almost equal impact on getting to where we are today and are an important part of the genre's history.
- vanattab 8y agoI am pretty sure there was an Arma mod that directly inspired pubg in there somewhere. Maybe even older then then hunger games mod. Edit: Oh I just looked it up. The mod was PUBG. I just realized it was the same guy who made it. It was released as a mod for Arma in 2015 by a player who went by the handle "PlayerUnknown". So I guess it was after the minecraft mod.
- pssflops 8y agoIs it even more odd that I can't figure why they did not reference the literal movie 'Battle Royale' that the concept was roughly based on?
- badpun 8y agoI always saw it as inspired by the Hunger Games, which in turn captured the zeitgeist of the post-2001 and post-2008 society.
- twunde 8y agoIt's almost certainly the other way around since Battle Royale was published in 1999 and the Battle Royale film came out in 2000. Both probably take some inspiration from Lord of the Flies
- badpun 8y agoBut why did the genre blow up only now? I think that the mass culture projects massive amount of anxiety present in todays societies, and it is also visible in video games. I don't see how a bleak and dystopian game of dog-eat-dog, everyone on its own, 1 player wins and the 99 others lose, would be so popular in say 1995.
- yqh 8y agoI think you're looking for a deep meaning that is not there. Video games are fun, period. The 12-yos that play Fortnite couldn't care less about dystopias.
- user5994461 8y agoThere might be meaning in the timeline actually. Internet was hardly available in the year 2000. It takes a lot of bandwidth (and probably CPU too) to run a 100 players FPS. It wouldn't do well before broadband got ubiquitous, almost a decade later.
- deleted 8y ago
- diminoten 8y agoI don't think you're appreciating the penetration that Fortnite has. PUBG may have come first, but Fortnite has 10x the players.
- techopoly 8y agoNot sure what Lord of the Flies has to do with battle royale...