In the Battle Royals space the place is littered with the corpses of devs and publishers who kept on the fad. PUBG got there first, and then FortNite leapfrogged them, and to be blunt all of other attempts are names with little or no recognition. Remember The Culling II? Yeah, neither do I. And I don’t remember the dozens of other games that have tried to copy the formula and never even got the trivial recognition of something like Radical Heights, which killed its publisher Boss Key.

Fade in games go something like this: a workable formula makes someone a lot of money. They rise and at a certain thresholds major publishers take note and iterate, crushing the original. Then other publishers inject said mechanics into their flagship games until people are so sick of them that they can’t stand it. There is a reason why all of the big upcoming shooters like CoD IV have battle royale modes.

To a lesser extent fads can burn out without studios ever really getting into it because it’s too small (relatively speaking of course). Surgeon Simulator set of years of “simulator” games ranging from I Am Bread to Black Screen Simulator. Eventually we got Shower With Your Dad Simulator which subverted the genre a bit, and set of another explosion of imitation. These indie fads tend to follow that pattern of initial massive explosion followed by secondary ignition when some slight twist on the formula introduces some air to the. mixture, and this repeats with smaller explosions until the last dregs of fuel are exhausted.

Zombie modes are another example, as are hero shooters like OverWatch (the “big thing” before BR). Remember LawBreakers? Exactly.

https://www.gamecrate.com/shadow-overwatch-how-games-are-try... What we’re seeing now with BR as it played out last cycle.