Unless you’ve been living under a rock, better yet, on another planet, you’ve definitely heard of the infamous Fortnite. Everyone and their mother is playing it, but let’s stop for a second and try to figure out what lead to this games’ mass adoption.
Originally Fortnite only offered a 4-person mode where players had to work together to protect themselves from zombies in a post-apocalyptic world. Players would build shelters or “forts” in order to defend themselves from the oncoming waves of zombies. This already draws similarities with two very notable games from many gamers’ pasts. Building shelter = Minecraft, defending yourself from zombies = Call of Duty Zombies. At the base, Fortnite was already attracting Minecraft and CoD Zombie players which were two massive pools of players (and pretty distinct pools at that).
Player Unknown Battlegrounds also known as PUBG is the older brother to Fortnite. Epic picked up on PUBGs success from having a battling mode where 100 players would fight to be the last man standing. They decided to apply these functions to Fortnite by introducing the Battle Royale mode. Similar to PUBG, but with the factor of building forts involved.
Another thing Fortnite did differently is that they took a much more cartoonish, humorous approach to the game by eliminating the gore element that warfare games are notorious for. In doing this, the game became much more parent-friendly, appealing to a larger age group, and therefore much more mass-adoptable.
Streamers were the biggest factor leading to Fortnite’s success. Any twitch streamer who was streaming Fortnite in its early stages and kept streaming throughout its rise to fame, doubled, tripled or quadrupled in viewers (same for youtubers). Look at Ninja, who was an early pioneer of Fortnite and a relatively small streamer. Since he started early and therefore had more experience with the game, he gained a ton of followers quickly because of his talent, peaking at his Fortnite stream with rappers Drake and Travis Scott. Now there are hundreds of Youtube videos being uploaded everyday about Fortnite, tons of twitch streamers playing it, and discussion of it on every social media platform you can imagine.
Epic Games combined the best parts of popular games like Minecraft, CoD Zombies and PUBG, therefore making it more intriguing for players from these games to play Fortnite. With all this hype, Fortnite had nowhere to go but up.
Do you think Fortnite will stay popular forever? Will Epic release another game that will overtake Fortnite? Is there another game on your radar that you think is on the rise? Let us know in the comments or tweet at us (@GameProtocolTKN).
