Fornite BR is exploding in popularity, with Ninja recently streaming with Drake, Kim Dotcom and another popular rapper. They broken the all-time record with 620k+ viewers at 2am!
I'm sure their success facilitated the decision to release this for free and also give out refunds for Paragon. Win/win for them!
Are you talking about Fortnite in general, or the Battle Royale mode?
The weird thing is that my impression is that Fortnite was talked about for awhile as this Horde-mode construction game, sort of like minecraft meets L4D. Then the BR F2P mode was added and the whole thing blew up.
I guess they can't complain about the success but it would have to feel at least a little bit demoralizing.
As far as I know the regular mode is not free to play.
I only tried it because it was a free alternative to PUBG
I just had the impression DOTA was made by some guy who wanted to make something like DOTA and Fortnite was made by some people who wanted to make some mix of L4D and Minecraft, but pivoted to doing something like PUBG instead.
Summary of video games in the last 5 years.
H1Z1/Rust/etc are all a continuous survivalist game and other games were mostly mods.
I'm personally excited to see where Activision or EA take the genre (Blizzard too but I don't see that happening anytime soon).
Cartoony makes it fun in a way that realistic graphics based games just can't match because of the aesthetic. It begs a silly-ness to elements that make it enjoyable and Epic can refresh at will (player skins for St. Pattys day, hidden Llama's on the map, Chinese new year theme, etc.)
PUBG had made quite a bit of money for Epic, through the UE4 licencing fees. This is akin to Amazon noticing how much money you made them through AWS and deciding to offer a free (arguably better, although I've never played more than 5 minutes of Fortnite, too much cartoon!) version of your product.
TBH, that analogy may be a bit unfair, but Epic is no saint.
Amazon ALSO makes Amazon basics branded knock off of the popular physical items in store. There's an article about an aluminum laptop stand you might be able to Google for.
Cheating is also a major issue.
So it was a clone, but basically a better one than the original.
Fortnite is the first survivor game that just works.
I felt bad for PUBG first, but PUBG is still such a huge mess, I do have to give it to Epic for building an extremely solid game that runs well and isn't rife with cheaters.
Shame about the business model, though.