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Fortnite's success, without any doubt in my mind, was not luck. Its borderline offensive to the people behind that game to suggest so. First of all, they weren

by 013a 8y ago

Fortnite's success, without any doubt in my mind, was not luck. Its borderline offensive to the people behind that game to suggest so. First of all, they weren't the first in the battle royale market. Many similarly styled games came before. Why hasn't PUBG, despite its absolute success, attained the relative success of Fortnite, which is likely driving 100x or more revenue? What about the many games or mods before PUBG? In Epic's case, a big reason is the infrastructure. PUBG is a pretty bad game, from a technical sense. It runs like crap on PC, and the console ports are even worse. Comparatively, though not bug free, Fortnite is one of the most optimized, beautiful, performant AAA games out there. They have in-house expertise with their engine. This is the difference between DICE making a technically amazing game like BF1 with Frostbite, then handing that exact same engine to the Bioware Montreal team to make Mass Effect Andromeda and getting that hot mess of a game. You can't just see a market trend like "oh battle royale games are popular" then become Fortnite. Their investment into the Unreal Engine helped make it possible. And that's not including the investment into Save the World, which probably wasn't alone an investment that would have shown returns. But it made Fortnite BR possible. Game companies make poor performing games sometimes. That doesn't mean they're bad developers, or that they are "lucky" when they have a success. Their ability to identify that they could take the foundations laid by StW and capitalize on the battle royale market trend is nothing short of marketing genius, because its not immediately obvious from playing StW, specifically the building mechanics, that it would work well as a battle royale game. None of them had building before fortnite. Ok, so they made a good game. Do you have any idea the engineering expertise that's necessary to scale a game like Fornite to the 8.3M concurrent players it experiences at peak? Fortnite is the most popular video game of all time, period. And, oh by the way, it's an online game with 100 player lobbies, real-time competitive-grade player interaction, and matchmaking within seconds. That's not easy. That's not "luck". And if they'd stumbled when they started achieving some small levels of success, people would have left. They didn't. [1] Luck has almost nothing to do with it. They didn't get lucky that they had an amazing engine and a game like StW to build on top of; those things were the result of a decade of amazing engineering. They didn't get lucky when they scaled from 500k concurrent players to 8M in a period of months. There isn't more than a dozen people in the world reading this who have experienced scale that dramatic, and even if you had, probability states that you would have failed, and even if you hadn't, you're probably not working in an industry with customers as fickle and shitty as video gaming. Epic succeeded, and that's a testament to incredible engineering, planning, forethought, and likely some very late nights, missed sleep, and sacrificed time with loved ones. They're successful because they're smart and they're hard working, not because they won the lottery. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/EPICGames/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/EPICGames/

metamet 8y ago
To look at just this point: > Why hasn't PUBG, despite its absolute success, attained the relative success of Fortnite, which is likely driving 100x or more revenue? PUBG has had a following almost despite itself. The performance is terrible, the game assets are bland and most are store-bought, and the development behind it is incredibly slow. People played PUBG with conviction for, what, 6 months to a year?, before Fortnite showed up and started peeling players away. And when they launched on the Xbox, you couldn't use the same account that you had on the PC--which was a pretty big slap in the face for a game whose only rewards are collectable aesthetics. While they're both technically the same genre, PUBG is slower and more methodical while Fortnite has quicker matches on the jump (if that's what you want), a more light hearted and original approach to style, and, of course, the building aspect. On top of that, they were professional. They released content on a regular schedule, with seasons and the season pass being something you could understand. They fix issues pretty quickly, and the game runs smooth. Plus the fact that it's not as intimidating as the gritty, slow pace of PUBG means there's likely a smaller barrier of entry. The team behind Fortnite churn out good work, and I think the community sees and appreciates that. The game feels healthy and growing, rather than stuck in a perpetual 'alpha' phase that PUBG is still in.
- lathiat 8y ago
  I'm not sure what its like elsewhere in the world but here in Australia the playerbase of PUBG and Fortnite are very different and don't have a lot of crossover. Fortnite is fundamentally much younger and less serious. This may well differ quite a bit in other markets. Also the narrative that PUBG is "under-performing crap" is only justified in the context that its a 100 player 8x8KM map. It performs better than basically all the other games that have tried to enter that arena with the partial exception of Fortnite. Except Epic wrote the engine (that PUBG is using) and they optimised it a lot for PUBG already and optimised Fortnite alot which PUBG then benefited from.
  - MauranKilom 8y ago
    > It performs better than basically all the other games that have tried to enter that arena with the partial exception of Fortnite. Planetside 2 has 8km x 8km maps with up to 2k players, with occasionally hundreds in the same fight. It's not a marvel of performance, but it's definitely better at it than PUBG.

by 013a 8y ago

metamet 8y ago

To look at just this point: > Why hasn't PUBG, despite its absolute success, attained the relative success of Fortnite, which is likely driving 100x or more revenue? PUBG has had a following almost despite itself. The performance is terrible, the game assets are bland and most are store-bought, and the development behind it is incredibly slow. People played PUBG with conviction for, what, 6 months to a year?, before Fortnite showed up and started peeling players away. And when they launched on the Xbox, you couldn't use the same account that you had on the PC--which was a pretty big slap in the face for a game whose only rewards are collectable aesthetics. While they're both technically the same genre, PUBG is slower and more methodical while Fortnite has quicker matches on the jump (if that's what you want), a more light hearted and original approach to style, and, of course, the building aspect. On top of that, they were professional. They released content on a regular schedule, with seasons and the season pass being something you could understand. They fix issues pretty quickly, and the game runs smooth. Plus the fact that it's not as intimidating as the gritty, slow pace of PUBG means there's likely a smaller barrier of entry. The team behind Fortnite churn out good work, and I think the community sees and appreciates that. The game feels healthy and growing, rather than stuck in a perpetual 'alpha' phase that PUBG is still in.

lathiat 8y ago
I'm not sure what its like elsewhere in the world but here in Australia the playerbase of PUBG and Fortnite are very different and don't have a lot of crossover. Fortnite is fundamentally much younger and less serious. This may well differ quite a bit in other markets. Also the narrative that PUBG is "under-performing crap" is only justified in the context that its a 100 player 8x8KM map. It performs better than basically all the other games that have tried to enter that arena with the partial exception of Fortnite. Except Epic wrote the engine (that PUBG is using) and they optimised it a lot for PUBG already and optimised Fortnite alot which PUBG then benefited from.
- MauranKilom 8y ago
  > It performs better than basically all the other games that have tried to enter that arena with the partial exception of Fortnite. Planetside 2 has 8km x 8km maps with up to 2k players, with occasionally hundreds in the same fight. It's not a marvel of performance, but it's definitely better at it than PUBG.