How Fortnite leveled up, broke records, and changed gaming
vox.com
vox.com
"But another huge boost to the game’s popularity has been cross-platform play — meaning you can play with your friends who are accessing it on a variety of devices and platforms."
And it can run on iOS and soon Android as well.. but not Linux.
That's a bit of a shame, kind of curious to try that game out now but I can't imagine gaming on Android / iOS is something comfortable.
I'd kill for Epic to throw some money at it =c
On Windows it's probably more performant either way, but at least with the above change I was able to at least run it playably on my 2017.
//slightly salty
And Intel? HA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
One word: gma500 ... welcome to hell!
OpenGL performance. NVidia tends to be far more performant than AMD on OpenGL games.
AMD has put more work into Vulkan, but a lot of games on Linux are still on OpenGL. See the CEMU community for details: https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/7nehtz/cemu_1113_amd_...
I don't dare update my display drivers unless I have 3 days without a deliverable because of the disaster it usually is.
Usually (yes, more than 50% of the times) it will break my displays (fail to detect both monitors, switch to some weird resolution etc), and always it will break CUDA/CUDNN so I have hours of work making that work again.
I have a completely standard setup: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, NVidia GPU, Intel CPU.
(I've been using Linux since Slackware 0.9, so yes I do know how to configure things. I'm sick of it not getting better since then).
Historically, drivers were often not available at all, at least not ones that actually exposed the real power of the hardware - and performance is usually lower.
See this set of recent benchmarks for instance, which show Linux performance lagging behind W10 by 15-25%.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-w...
I'm thinking it being Free To Play on consoles(where there aren't lots of F2P games) was the big upswing.
Can't help but wonder if they looked at PUBG's figures and saw their market research done for them? I was looking forward to Fortnite as the Garry's-Mod-meets-Left-for-Dead and its sudden emphasis on Battle Royale was a little disappointing.
I believe the story goes that just a couple of devs went off and made the Battle Royale version to see if it would be fun to play.
I'm not so sure. Did World of Warcraft change gaming? It surely changed the MMO scene, and they went from total niche market to being very openly discussed and for a while (ca 2008 to 2014?) you found people everywhere that didn't identify as gamers before, but got hooked on WoW. But did it change "gaming"? I don't know, console gamers still play their console games, there are some MMOs, but the majority is still single player/coop/small team and I don't see the PC (non-RPG) gaming market being totally different since WoW was released in 2004.
TLDR: Huge hit: yes. Changed a certain genre of games: probably. Changed gaming: nope.
The answer is "yes", which invalidates your whole argument. You should have picked a better example.
The future is subscriptions for steady defined bonuses backed up with digital content which can be merely cosmetic or bonuses that don't exceed what a subscription grants and can even enhance that. See Wargaming, which produces games like World of Tanks, World of Warships, and more. You can be wholly free to play or you pay to ease the grind. Working this way you let players get midway into the game before the grind starts to be noticeable then sell them a means to ease it
The pay to win loot box crowd may have finally killed their golden goose with relentless greed brought to the forefront by some very large titles by well known companies generating a lot of bad press.
There are countless small games on tablets and phones which pull in large revenue for boosts and cosmetics.
Why? Subscriptions are not casual-friendly at all. Take GW2, for example. I bought the expansion in august, and had to stop playing in october. I might've logged in for the daily chest, but otherwise I haven't played. When I played, I bought some gold and cosmetic items. A few QoL items as well. And I bought the game plus expansions/DLCs. The original game is now F2P. There is no subscription. Me basically not having played the game since october cost me nothing. If I were playing WoW still, I'd have paid 13 EUR a month for essentially nothing. WoW's main gameplay is raiding. Raiding requires M+ dungeons and grinding. WoW's subscription model means that if you stop playing, you fall behind. The entire game is made to keep you subbed (I call it "forced errands"). It made me feel bad when I didn't play the game ("FOMO"). Contrast that to GW2: I can take a break whenever I feel like. A subscription model does not cater well to casuals. And the casuals are the masses. You don't see new MMOs follow subscription models. Some tried to, and they failed, including your SWTOR example.
You're also kind of glossing over the fact that SWTOR is still (rightfully) ridiculed in MMO circles for its initial F2P offering (click here to buy this additional hotbar!).
IMHO the most healthy MMOs are still subscription-driven: WoW, EVE, and FFXIV.
Even the most decidedly non-hardcore "regular" WoW players would reach Level 20 in a month easily, whereas there's enough content to keep you occupied for years even if you started just now.
Maybe we're just talking different viewpoints. When did "online gaming" change gaming? (If we can agree that it did?) There were online MUDs in the 80s, but hardly anyone knew of them. I'd say the break through in online games were the mid- to end 90s in the upcoming web. (Quake et.al, I wouldn't say Doom already counts, but maybe my own experience is too prominent here) - and then again the MMO years - nothing of that changed the whole spectrum of gaming. On the other hand, maybe ever shift from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit changed gaming. Did the release of every breakthrough console change gaming?
Maybe I just fail to see the revolutionary steps :)
(not the person you're replying to)
I've heard it said that it's because there's a strong MMO influence on many console games (which aren't MMOs) these days.
(This isn't something I can personally comment on, as I haven't played that many modern console games, it's just what I've heard others say).
The other element is Epic Games pushing Sony, Microsoft towards cross-play. That would change gaming if they can get them to agree to it. They are inching towards it with consoles, mobile and PC playing together - PS4 to Xbox1 hasn't happened but would change gaming.
Social circles with kids are around what gaming platform they are on. Mine mostly play with friends to goof around and chat with each other (live talking, not instant message kind of chat). Cross play across consoles would change gaming - they would not be confined to a certain console dictating who they play with.
Their backend systems are doing the cross play, can you imagine if they stand up their backend platform to allow other developers on Unreal Engine to use that for cross play in their games?
I don't buy the crossplay argument though, it's just a given that you usually don't crossplay, but I simply cannot imagine the studios are internally using different protocols or even different servers. Sure, you need to port the "client" game on different platforms and sometimes make some adjustments (twinstick shooter vs keyboard mouse, etc) - but there's no inherent reason (at least to me) that crossplay can work. So is this accidentally game changing then when someone finally decides to tear down the barriers? :)
I think it would be game changing if it pushed the industry to not have platform exclusives and to just allow a player on any platform to play against a player from any other platform.
Game changing doesn't have to be something highly technical or in a 3D engine, etc.
Fortnite is rated T and not M because there isn't realistic violence. When a player is eliminated a small flying object with an antenna shows up and it looks like they are teleported elsewhere. There is no blood or corpse or anything like that. It is not extremely violent enough to get an M rating like Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty.
There are very unrealistic elements of the game, like a grenade launcher that shoots large eggs (or snowballs in winter season), the fact that you can rapidly build forts out of mined materials, and a boogie bomb that when thrown at an enemy makes them dance for 3-5 seconds.
Young males seem to tend to be fascinated with violence video games or not.
Other than being a little pricey, I don’t see any problem with Epic’s monetization strategy with Fortnite.
Asking money for cosmetic-only things is obscene?
As VR has brought me closer to a world I previously had little contact with I've find the gaming community's quickness to anger and it's (lack of a) sense of perspective fairly exhausting.
It's impossible to even begin a discussion about monetisation strategies without getting shouted down. You'd think we were discussing gun reform in the midwest. ;-)
Pay to win games just moved the Overton window so far that these days, paying for cosmetic items doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm not angry about any of this; with ever decreasing time left for playing games I don't really care. Obscene may be a bit harsh -- I recycled it from the grandparent; but it does also imply that the judgment is relative and based on taste more than anything. I'd also use it when saying that I use an obscene amount of salt or that a sweater is an obscene color without intending to downplay affairs of state.
[1] This seems super rare these days, right?
Do you normally think all businesses that make a profit are obscene?
I think obscene is charging people $60 for a game and then driving everyone towards in game purchases for cosmetic items.