It's not about the Battle Royale genre itself. >As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to D

It's not about the Battle Royale genre itself. >As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved. 7 Days to Die is graphically nowhere near what Fortnite is. Rust had its official release in the same year as Fortnite and ARK was literally made with UE4. That is, the technology Epic used to build Fortnite was used by ARK. >The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from hats for over a decade! You're completely overlooking the part where Valve's initial idea for those games was to push Steam. That way even if the monetization strategy wasn't great it would pay off. Fortnite did not have such a plan initially (at least not that we know of). Valve also wasn't anywhere near first at making their games F2P and monetizing them with microtransactions. F2P games with microtransactions have been a part of Korean MMOs since the early 2000s. There were even private servers of other MMOs that essentially monetized in such a way. You're not wrong that the battle-royale part of Fortnite was a second attempt at popularizing the game, but the tech to make Fortnite pushed UE4 forward quite a bit. Things like Distance Field Ambient Occlusion were things that might not have made it into the engine without Fortnite.