If Fortnite Were a Website, It Would Rival Reddit and Amazon
tomsguide.com
tomsguide.com
> What this means is that, unlike so many other gaming trends, Fortnite truly seems like it's here to stay. According to Google searches, Fortnite has a ways to go to reach the staggering highs of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game that became a huge phenomenon throughout the summer of 2016.
The argument is that Fortnite is not a fad, and then it's immediately compared to one of the biggest gaming fads in recent memory? And it isn't quite as popular as that fad? Okay.
> “More people in the U.S. are searching for ‘Fortnite’ on Google than they are for ‘Reddit’ and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company.
What a genius comparison! Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
And good search is hard to do.
It seems to me that googling for a popular site like reddit is actually pretty common. A couple of reasons:
1. Because google is often much better at returning relevant results for site:<site>.com <query> than searching for <query> in the site's search engine. I would think this to be the case even more so for types of sites like reddit simply because of such high total post / word count. In fact, brand recognition would seem to be more of a reason for people to google it. E.g. If you want to read a wikipedia article on some topic, you normally wouldn't visit wikipedia.org first to use its search, you'd google "wikipedia <topic>" or "site:wikipedia.org <topic>".
2. To avoid hitting enter after a typo and ending up on some malware site <domain with typo>.com.
Google Trends is almost completely meaningless for both judging the popularity of a game, and the popularity of sites like reddit or Amazon.
The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft. The reason is that the r value is small enough that population growth during the games lifetime is non-negligible.
EDIT: To phrase it more bluntly:
"The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft."
... is mistaken. Mario is the most obvious counterexample, but there are dozens of others.
Dota became a cultural phenomenon, and has stayed a cultural phenomenon, solely through the internet. No internet, no dota.
It's simply mistaken.
Or do I need to prove Dota is a cultural phenomenon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y
I would say that franchising/sequels reflect the fact that if you have content which is just barely sub-viral you can pump money into marketing to get virality to get more money. Basically a controlled fission reaction instead of an explosion.
Can you clarify?
Is the following an example of an instance of that curve?
y = x2^(-1x)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
This curve is a variant of the natural exponential function, where the dependent variable is time. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function
If you watch, say the Direwolf20 series on Age Of Engineering, he ends up building this huge space station to win. But, that space station was his idea, not a requirement, my play of AoE has a tiny airless platform with a warp drive in it for space exploration and my main base was in the open air in a parallel universe where it never rains. He spends lots of time building structures in low gravity wearing a jetpack, I spent more fencing off wildlife. This wasn't a choice explicitly offered in the game, just a consequence of different people with the same infinite box of Lego bricks building a different layout. The very different experiences mean essentially infinite replay value.
"Random" sandbox elements became very popular in video games, but QA teams militate against building anything like Minecraft where you just can't test because there's a combinatorial explosion of interactions. Instead most games have a handful of set pieces with inconsequential random elements.
But that means even if nobody else's game of Shadow of Mordor is exactly the same, they're so similar as to preclude most interest in replaying. Which makes good economic sense, sell the player a new one every year. But you don't become a phenomenon like Minecraft that way.
This is the (analyst) data everyone is citing: https://www.superdataresearch.com/us-digital-games-market/
I would argue that Twitch has had a really strong role in making battle royale games popular -- they're extremely fun to watch in comparison to MOBAs which I'm starting to realize are fairly dull in the beginning but the anticipation of what happens mid-game to late game makes it exciting.
* monthly active users -- 130 million as of late 2017[1] to Fortnite's 45 million total players as of March.
* maxed concurrent users[2] -- 7.5 million to 3.4 million.
* monthly revenue[3].
While I think LoL is losing ground to Fortnite and PUBG, they have a way left to go to supersede it.
[1] Notably, Riot hasn't released new numbers since, so its possible that monthly actives for LoL has shrunk in Q1 2018.
[2] https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-battle-royale-pla...
[3] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-03-superdata-...
A good player (say, Ninja) routinely plays an entire 20 minute game, eliminating maybe a dozen or so other players themselves out of the roughly 100 starting. So for them this 20 minutes is spent doing what they enjoy, stalking and killing their opponents. On a run, Ninja might do this three times in an hour. A whole hour of being awesome.
A bad player like me usually is eliminated much earlier in the game, maybe they spend that time frantically hiding from superior players, or they lay traps, or the stay on the fringes of the island away from contact, sooner or later though they get killed... and then they immediately jump into a _different game_ and start over. In an hour they might play 10 games, or even thirty if they're very, very bad or just love starting in the most conflicted zones and often die in the opening seconds.
The rest of the game design exists to reinforce this basic idea, for example there's a "zone" or "storm" mechanism forcing players into a gradually smaller (but random) part of the map as the game progresses to keep them in conflict so that they get eliminated. Players deliberately aren't named while they're alive, you are sniping some chick in a rabbit suit, not LiverpoolFCFan, and she won't be back in the same game, so you don't learn anything re-usable.
The result of this trick of perspective is that more people are having fun, not just the most skilled players.
This is great for gaming. Fortnite has driven twitch viewers to crazy new heights and while most of them will never come back (check wii sales against the most popular game franchises on the Wii’s sales) some percentage will have found their new thing and the ecosystem will be stronger for having weathered the crashing wave.
You do know that the Wii actually "won" it's generation in terms of unit sales?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_c...
And the Switch is now closing in on the Xbone...
Not exactly what I would call a "fad".
So...what exactly would you call a fad?
The wii was popular for many reasons, and I'm sure it became "popular" to buy one, but it didn't lose to a social hype dying down, it lost to a new generation of consoles (and it's successor didn't do well in comparison to those)
1) Barely ahead of PUBG in unique players despite being free to play and PUBG costing $30
2) Shameless clone of PUBG
The cultural phenomenon is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Fornite is riding on the hype by being free to play.
Which itself is often called a clone of H1Z1. Which in turn was inspired by DayZ..
That being said, both the games you reference, their Battle Royale mode was actually made by the creator of PUBG:
> Brendan Greene, also known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, is the creator of the Battle Royale mod that started in the DayZ mod for Arma 2. Recently, Battle Royale has been licensed by SOE and made an official game mode in H1Z1
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/battle-royale-modder-brendan-greene-...
So your reference to those actually support my point.
They all were inspired by the movie Battle Royale, but that was a movie, not a game. If movie <-> games were indicators of mutual success that would be a first.
Grandparent was suggesting that PUBG copied off of H1N1/DayZ, justifying Fortnite copying PUBG. While sony cloned PUBG, they licensed it, whereas Fornite didn't. But they were not originally Battle Royale games and the Battle Royale modes came from the creator of PUBG.
> They are referring to the BR modes in those games, and they are effectively clones and inspired by the movie Battle Royal.
I don't get what you're saying here. I mentioned the movie Battle Royale, not them. And predecessor games' battle royale modes grandparent suggested PUBG cloned from were made by the PUBG creator. I'm not sure what I said really counts as "pedantic" so much as the grandparent completely misrepresenting facts.
That was a big risk compared to PUBG's conservative and incremental iteration on the existing genre.
Though these Fortnite vs PUBG arguments sure sound like the Xbox vs PS3 forum debates back in the day... I was always thankful that I didn't encounter them on HN.
That being said, both the games you reference, their Battle Royale mode was actually made by the creator of PUBG:
> Brendan Greene, also known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, is the creator of the Battle Royale mod that started in the DayZ mod for Arma 2. Recently, Battle Royale has been licensed by SOE and made an official game mode in H1Z1
I agree PUBG implementation is terrible, but nonetheless the credit is due where it's due. Brendan Greene started it, and PUBG trails Fornite only slightly despite costing $30.