Fortnite was initially a huge flop - it wasn't free to begin with - I played the alpha and beta, the game was basically a boring PvE (player versus environment) building. Minecraft with better graphics. Users had to build "bases" with material to prevent zombies over-running them when they spawned and attacked you. A little bit like RUST (another game not the programming language) - except the raids in this case are usually done by humans, raiding for resources other players' stocks inside bases.
Then somehow out of the blue - Fortnite became huge: they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play, and compared to the competition, the game ran smoothly on almost any PC using it. This coupled with its young cartoony look like League of Legends and riding the Battle Royale hype without the realism, helped surely fuel it.
Let's not forget that Tim - the man behind Fortnite - is also the man behind Unreal, Unreal Tournament (huge RIP Unreal Tournament and its fanbase - that's another story not many would wanna know about now ), Paragon (another RIP and an angry fanbase) and the Unreal engine, which is Epic Game's biggest asset after Fortnite ( actually I have no data to compare what makes Epic Games more money, Unreal Engine or Fortnite at this time)
P.S. If you're into this stuff also look up Cliff Bleszinski / Cliffy B: he's another big name from the Unreal scene but retired from Epic Games when Tencent bought a huge stake and "peaced out' from the scene after his career flopped when he tried to do solo projects.
That “somehow” is pretty obvious: they had already built all the assets for a great multiplayer FPS-esque, and already had a whole marketing department spun up to get people to play it. Once they decided to pivot to Battle Royale as a game mechanic, they spent a month on rewriting game logic, and then had a nearly-finished AAA Battle Royale game on their hands with a staff ready to sell it, with more polish than existing entries in the genre and no other studios close to catching up to chase the fad in time.
Business take-away: if you build for a well-established, very competitive market, and then—near the finish line—pivot into a new and (as yet) less-competitive market where you can still reuse everything you built, the extra polish you had to put into your product to get it to stand out in the heavily-competitive field, will make you stand head-and-shoulders above everyone else in the less-competitive field.
(I’m trying to think of other good examples of this effect in the business domain but coming up short. Anyone?)
> (I’m trying to think of other good examples of this effect in the business domain but coming up short. Anyone?)
Probably the most famous example is a company called Burbn. Here's a story (not mine) about that pivot:
Posting anon.
In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.
To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.
Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.
As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.
That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.
I remember Larry Chiang. Whatever happened to him? He always seemed so lacking of substance but somehow figured out how to show up everywhere. Is he actually the international man of mystery who made it big but keeps his secrets to himself, or just a con artist barely making it by living in a cheap apartment? Obviously the world isn't that black and white but I really wonder what happens to people like him.
Sketch, from Bohemian, did something that feels like this.
They were working on a vector drawing software, targeted at making rich web2.0 type illustrations more easily. For an example, check out the screenshot of the early app for an idea of the kind of output they were showing off in 2012: https://www.macgasm.net/2012/08/16/sketch-2-1-update-adds-re...
They were competing with Adobe Illustrator at this time, which was extremely dense and less focused on that one thing.
And then skeumorphism fell away and product design workflows started evolving and absorbing the systematization practices from devops, etc, and designers needed a way to make mockups that was more advanced than hypersimplistic tools like balsamiq, but less dense/more focused than Illustrator. In 2019, their value prop is completely different (and better!), but the bones of that first application are very visible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EatUkHez0U
Since sketch's customers were making this journey, they software emerged along with it, and they deservedly dominated the early product design workflow. Now Adobe's competing with them instead of the other way around, but new entrants like Figma are building in features that are easier from a fresh start, like web collab and canvas items as react elements. Long term, they might get PUBG'd, to use a fortnight analogy – pioneering the category but getting usurped by bigger hits (fortnight) down the line.
I think the lesson is that execution (and marketing) are everything. Unreal is a quake rip. Fortnite is a pubg rip. But they executed extremely well. So well that they feel fresh and not like a rip.
A quake rip? Not at all.
Unreal games always meant to be tech demos so their primary business objective: licensing out the engine became successful.
The unreal engine was also one of the first engine with proper edit / scripting tools arround it. They already had them in the 90s with unrealed.
Id software with quake did not really have such a license model (apart from some examples)
Even today the idtech engine is not build to just license out to other companies.
I’d argue that the very first Unreal was a game first, a tech demo later. So was Unreal Tournament (based on Unreal Engine 1, IIRC), Unreal Tournament 2003, and – this one for sure – Gears of War.
Maybe I wouldn’t call them Quake rips though; However, all the Unreals certainly weren’t innovative in any meaningful way, gameplay wise.
The engine business exploded for Epic around Unreal Engine 3, I believe. Before that: they really wanted to sell those games. See the career of aforementioned CliffyB – he wasn’t Epic’s John Carmack, he was their John Romero.
As for Id Software, they did licensed their technology since early days (Half-Life, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, few others), but indeed Unreal surpassed them with tooling and support.
Id tried to recover their position, around Doom 3 they renamed their „Quake engine” to Id Tech, and was working on the user-friendliness of it’s offering. I think they abandoned that idea by themselves, nonetheless, soon after they were bought by ZeniMax and that was it: no more licenses for companies not related to Bethesda. They don’t even bother to allow their current games to be modded.
Meanwhile Epic’s engine business was flourishing, yet the games were flopping. Notice that only after Fortnite’s success they decided to open their Steam rival.
> Notice that only after Fortnite's success they decided to open their Steam rival.
Had they done those the other way around, it probably wouldn't have worked- Fortnite is what sent Epic Games from the technosphere to Wal-Mart in terms of societal recognition.
> Maybe I wouldn’t call them Quake rips though; However, all the Unreals certainly weren’t innovative in any meaningful way, gameplay wise.
No meaningful way, gameplay wise? UT had way more game modes than Quake3 did... two-team TF2-style objective with attackers and defenders, that football mode, betrayal mode, four-team domination, or the various vehicle modes... I had a lot of fun in those modes which they seemed to enjoy experimenting in
Everybody here is missing why this game became so popular, and it's very common trap with the game. Its the reason why the game has also been so polarizing. I've played the game steadily for over a year now, so I have a bit of a grip on what happened/is going on.
- Fortnite is not a shooting game. This is the main trap of the game. It looks like shooter, feels like a shooter, can be played like a shooter, but is not a shooter. Fortnite is a fighting game and should be played like one. It has an incredibly heavy reliance on mechanical skills (ala fighting games) and failure to recognize this will just lead to disappointment with the game.
- Fortnite's success was a complete accident. The BR mode was a spun off "weekend project" for fun in order to attract players into buying Save The World. It was free and meant really just as an advertising tool. There wasn't much thought put into how it was supposed to play, but Epic 100% did not see where this was going, nor did the community at the time. And that was very much instrumental to it's success. Had Epic saw this coming, they would have totally destroyed the mechanics that made it so good right off the rip. I could write an essay about this, but the short of it is that the building mechanics were used in a totally unintended/unforeseen way and it lead to a wild success. Mark my words, one day in the future, free of NDA's, former devs will come out with some truly wild stories about FNBR.
- Fortnite became a runaway success with kids because they have the easiest time adapting to completely new game mechanics. It gets a little gritty here, but the short of it is that Fornite is a completely new type of game with a completely new type of play style. Older players were trying to shove a square piece through a seemingly square hole (see note 1 about shooter/fighter), while younger players could easily adapt their blank gaming slates to fortnite's play style. Yeah the cosmetics and stuff helped, but nobody likes playing a game they suck at.
TL;DR: Fortnite is deceiving in what it is. Fortnite was a total accidental success, because of accidentally awesome mechanics. Kids love fortnite because they were less prone to that earlier mentioned deception, and can pick up new things much quicker than older gamers.
This reminds me of a little-known game called Worms 2. Someone figured out how to hack the weapon properties and effectively created a surge in popularity around this game for a new type called a "rope game". It's still one of the most fun and skillful games I've ever played. But this was back in the 90s, so in-game purchases weren't a thing.
So to monetize on that popularity the creator of the game released "Worms 2 Armageddon", with a rope game. The problem was, they didn't get it at all. The official rope game had none of the elements of the hacked one, and was a complete flop. But oddly enough, Worms 2 (the original) was still being played almost a decade later.
Huge Roper fan here since Worms Armageddon! It was all because the Team17 devs allowed to mod game maps and weapon configs so easily. Creativity then kicked in and roper games became a stable online thing! Also BnG and "Shoppa"
You are completely right about the mechanics, I've played it some with the step-son and I can't get the hang of it, I've played FPS on and off over the years and I'm not bad at them but it just doesn't fit my mental model.
Same - I don't totally suck in FPS and can put up at least decent fight all the way back to Doom II which we also tried in the interest of software history. But I get thoroughly spanked in Fortnite, every time.
Exactly right. I improved the most in Fortnite by just landing in a corner (pre creative mode) and practicing building, editing, build-shooting, the same way I would work on combos in fighting games.
"There wasn't much thought put into how it was supposed to play, but Epic 100% did not see where this was going, nor did the community at the time. And that was very much instrumental to it's success. Had Epic saw this coming, they would have totally destroyed the mechanics that made it so good right off the rip."
Similarly, combos in fighting games were originally a bug. In the original Street Fighter 2, you could attack someone two or three times before they could block or counterattack (I believe the initial term was called a 2 in 1). Capcom liked what it did to the game, and consequently kept it in.
It's not so much learning speed, but it being a level playing field. Old gamers who have been fpsing since Doom / Quake / TF2 / whatever might be capable of learning Fortnite, but they won't dominate it without spending thousands of hours on it. Kids will spend time getting good, because they have more free time and they enjoy it because for once they don't get destroyed by the fps crowd.
I like this observation. You could argue that Salesforce did the same thing pivoting from CRM into the platform as a service market. They had the user management, security, configuration tools, reporting, etc, that they were able to take into marketing, call center, etc.
Overwatch is only original in the sense that the IP didn't exist. There's a pretty decent (probably to be taken with a pinch of salt) article from Eurogamer which summarises an AMA and a few old articles and explains how OW came from "Titan" - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-14-blizzards-jeff...
GP's examples are more applicable to the question posed about late-stage pivots. IP is not the point. It's about having a particular business objective / product in development whose assets were redeployed to realize a different vision.
Overwatch came from the assets in development for the cancelled Project Titan MMO.
DoTA was built in War3's map editor.
Hearthstone used the IP from the Warcraft franchise.
Artifact used the IP from Dota 2.
Dota Auto Chess was built in Dota 2's map editor.
DotA spawned from Starcraft custom map Aeon of Strife using new mechanics from WC3, DotA:Allstars/DOTA 2 is a heavy revamp of the original map. Between WoW and Hearthstone there was WoW TCG, not a video game.
Overwatch is basically Blizzard's take on Team Fortress 2, which became a stand alone game from the old mod Team Fortress from Quake/QuakeWorld when Valve picked up the IP from the original creators John Cook and Robin Walker.
This is a very accurate assessment. It was a real effective marketing team combined with a very smart pivot to an adjacent market and hitting product market fit.epic games tried and tried and tried (paragon, recent attempts to revitalize unreal tournament, etc) and eventually they got a huge hit.
Yeah, it's like the Picasso napkin thing. Fortnite wasn't an overnight success, it was decades in the making. I had so much hype for the new Unreal Tournament, but after seeing how that was handled I never even gave Paragon a shot. I'm glad Epic Games eventually figured things out.
Slack's creation might fit this formula, too. What started out as an in-game chat function in the ultra-competitive gaming world turned out to be a dazzling workplace communication tool.
I disagree. There was no magic trick here. Unreal is a company built with the best and brightest in the games industry over a very long period. I don't think any other company could have replicated their success - they just don't have that level of talent density.
> they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play
Let's be honest here, it's more accurate to say they saw the massive popularity of PubG, copied the gameplay mode, and made it free in a transparent attempt to boost a failing game and get in front of the PubG juggernaut. The initial version of Fortnite BR wasn't that great, it was just free.
Where the Fortnite team really did a good job was taking that initial BR version and turning it into something with huge global appeal and continuing fresh content to keep players engaged for multiple years.
Yeah, but after making millions, instead of investing heavily in a crack team to shape things up, they just tackled mobile instead, completely rebuilding the game in another engine, and adding lootboxes, etc. all while slowly driving away their core fanbase.
It helps that epic had 800 employees to start churning out updates after it got traction. None of the previous BR games had studios working at that scale.
A true difference in knowing how to use the tool. Obviously, the creators of the engine are going to put out a more optimized game than pretty much anyone else using it.
Don't forget having the team work 90 hour weeks for multiple years to power the success.
Edit: I like that I'm getting downvoted by fanboys of epic for pointing out the large human cost to games being "updated as fast as gamers want it". https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-cru... if you don't know but games are very complex simulations and very hard to work on. Keeping fortnite up to date took a ton of effort by a ton of people in a not really sustainable way for peoples lives or careers to make it a success. Also can take irreversible impacts on help and psyche.
And really every time I played that game it was still massively buggy. For instance build to weapon switch issue that locked me out of controls for 1-3 seconds on a regular basis.
And epic got very good at the cheating stuff because they were helping blue hole solve the same issues and got to prototype it out on pubg and got a headstart there. Yeah that's a risk of using a team's engine but...
They could've hired more people and got the same work cranked out in similar time, long hours != popular. Plenty of companies have cracked the whip, but it doesn't always lead to success.
Sure, this is true. If it is one person. These games are huge, with multiple teams. So this is clearly not true. No one person knows one part of the game.
You easily get the situation where creators know better than the makers.
Even if PUBG didn't have all the technical problems, Fortnite still would've been huge. They have different enough audiences - a lot of PUBG players don't like Fortnite (and vice versa). There's overlap sure, but not so much that it's a zero-sum game.
I don't disagree with that idea, after all the market for gamers is so large. But I do know that the ~30 or so people I regularly played with in PUBG left PUBG because of the poor code and cheating to go to other games (most of us went non-BR I think). And even now that we're told that it's better we have no desire to go back. The wounds go too deep. XD
Initially sure, but I think the building capabilities of Unreal and their underlying experience with the engine making contributed to their staying power.
Unreal is a hyper hyper smart games company. They built the frameworks that companies built games on. I think it's really awesome to see them win in the end like this after decades in the sticks.
They got it to the market quickly and made a couple of billion. While we can hindsight now about some very poor choices they made -- choices that opened them up to rampant cheating with little ability to block it -- they made bank and have already had a success curve that has gone far longer than most games do, regardless of how perfectly they were executed.
Depends both on how you define "they" and "make". PUBG Corp has made roughly a couple of billion USD in revenue, but definitely not a couple of billion in profit. (The 2018 numbers were $920M revenue, $311 in profit.)
But also, that's PUBG-the-company, not PUBG-the-game. The distinction is that the PUBG mobile version (with tens of millions of daily actives) is by Tencent, and PUBG-the-company gets some kind of licensing revenue from it.
That and trusting client information with extraordinarily few server-side validation such as, for instance, impossible shots, impossible movements, impossible speed, etc. It does no client information culling (beyond a large circle of information around the player's position) enabling wallhacks, aimhacks, etc.
These are hard problems to solve on the server side, and require resources, so it was easier not to worry about it at all, and at most do post-game analysis occasionally to try to retroactively detect the impossible (with a very low detection rate, so much so that they rely upon user reports).
This is one of the selling points of something like Stadia (which has to be balanced with the downside of latency) -- by default a cloud renderer would give minimal information to the client.
Basically the battle royale game mode was all they had as an identity. Almost everything else about the game is generic. The graphics look like every asset-flip from the last ten years, music is utterly forgettable, there's just no style. I hate almost everything about Fortnite's style but it does have a distinct one.
Compare Wolfenstein 3D to Doom, except pretend Wolfenstein never had the "Nazis" idea and you were just fighting generic soldiers.
PUBG and H1Z1 were the only BRs at the time before the whole BR craze and fortnite came out
PUBG was supposedly the "better" h1z1 but even ninja (the famous ninja that played with drake, former halo player etc.) went back to h1z1 solely because pubg was so garbo
then fortnites BR came onto the scene and the rest is history
Sure, but this isn't particularly different from any other multiplayer FPS throughout the history of the genre. There's a bunch of common game modes that have been around forever, like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, assault, king of the hill, etc. These game modes were reused repeatedly by pretty much any arena FPS that came out within a span of over a decade. Battle royale and team battle royale are simply the latest (very popular) game modes that most new FPSs are including. Zombie was the previous hot game mode, but that's cooled off a bit now.
I agree - a lot of it...it was the look of the game, the fact it ran smoothly and the building that made a lot of people try it out: I can feel some teenagers going like: "Hey look it's like minecraft but with guns"
but let's not forget the emotes/dances. Those went viral!
Eh, and PubG got it from H1Z1 which got it from DayZ which got it from Minecraft which got it from the Hunger Games movie, etc. Welcome to remix culture.
What's interesting is that fortnite underwent almost exactly the same journey as H1Z1. Start as a paid PvE, release free BR, cancel survival and focus on BR.
It's important, but I think even more important than women was children and the mobile story behind it. I hear all the time of kids playing fortnite at school and it have a cult like following.
I still get the urge to play the original UT. It is weird that instinctively that era of games feels mere years ago but it is more like 2 decades. Perhaps it’s that the leap from ZZT to UT seems far more vast than UT to Fortnite.
People should pay more attention to Tim Sweeney. He appears to have a much better grasp on how to run a tech company using an open platform than the more well known Silicon Valley CEOs. The Unreal Engine may not be explicitly open source as in Linux, but it’s all viewable and the licensing terms are reasonable.
Community is still around in fact the whole UT (from 99 to 4) fanbase hangs around a couple of Discords. Mind you, we're talking about 200 people globally probably so, it's tiny but big enough to play.
Cliffy B was the lead designer for Gears of War. A big moneymaker for Epic and one of the most unique shooters to date. When I think of Epic I think of Gears, then Unreal Engine.
It’s also easy to overlook, but at the time PUBG was nearing peak impact, the only console version was a buggy Xbox port. I remember being completely taken in with PUBG streams but with only a PS4 had no way to play.
I downloaded Fortnite certain it was a hack and a ripoff but it was literally the only Battle Royale-style game available to me at the time. Being free and on all platforms out of the gate was crucial.
I heard another reason why Fortnight became so big. I had discussions with young high school gamers and they say the single reason Fortnight became so big is that it's available on every platform. Even though one person has an XBox, another has a PS4, another has a Nintendo Switch, another just has a PC, and the casual players have Android or IOS, everyone can play with each other when they go home. Also, they play a lot of different games, but they play Fortnight everyday.
I personally enjoyed the PvE, just like I enjoyed H1Z1 survival. But as far as replayability goes, I guess PvP has more longevity.
I think what really lead to Fortnite's ultra success was how well optimized the game was, that they even were able to put it on mobile and every low end computer out there.
Then somehow out of the blue - Fortnite became huge: they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play, and compared to the competition, the game ran smoothly on almost any PC using it. This coupled with its young cartoony look like League of Legends and riding the Battle Royale hype without the realism, helped surely fuel it.
Let's not forget that Tim - the man behind Fortnite - is also the man behind Unreal, Unreal Tournament (huge RIP Unreal Tournament and its fanbase - that's another story not many would wanna know about now ), Paragon (another RIP and an angry fanbase) and the Unreal engine, which is Epic Game's biggest asset after Fortnite ( actually I have no data to compare what makes Epic Games more money, Unreal Engine or Fortnite at this time)
P.S. If you're into this stuff also look up Cliff Bleszinski / Cliffy B: he's another big name from the Unreal scene but retired from Epic Games when Tencent bought a huge stake and "peaced out' from the scene after his career flopped when he tried to do solo projects.