Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

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266 pointsbdz297 comments

I don't really like Fortnite, but I'm really really happy for Epic's success. PUBG was a flaming dumpster heap that only caught on because the Battle Royale mechanic is naturally fun and people were clamoring for that type of game. But it was an unqualified mess from a subpar developer, and that always annoyed me because gamers deserved better. Now Epic has been rescued from sliding into obscurity and they've got massive coffers to continue working on Unreal 4. Couldn't have worked out better.

"Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?

I understood it as "people who like this genre deserve a game that is not crap"

It's difficult for me to imagine a game that 50 million people bought and played for several hours as "crap". It has its warts and there are certainly things I don't like about it, but 50 million people don't accidentally buy Shaq Fu or Big Rigs or whatever is the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game.

Replace Gamers with "Customers", and better with "a competitive marketplace, instead of a monopoly".

> "Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?

It means they deserve better than all the garbage that's been pushed out over the last 5 years or so since Unity and Unreal became free, and Steam relaxed its submission standards. There's been a massive wave of terrible "games" that people are just forced to accept because they don't know any better.

I'm not hating on indie game devs in general, there are of course plenty of amazing ones. But the real problem is this trend of a small group of devs forming a "studio", coming up with really ambitious plans for a huge game after learning Unity for a month, and then releasing early access garbage like PUBG and abandoning it when they realize making a triple-A game takes years of effort by a vast team of expert professionals.

There would be no Fortnite if it wasn't for Brendan Greene aka PlayerUnknown, who is basically single-handedly responsible for creating the Battle Royale game genre. I see no problem in him attempting to make some money on his creation before a AAA giant comes in and sucks the air out of the room.

That's a mighty large statement. He may have made one of the most popular games but he certainly did not come up with the idea in gaming (Minecraft mods based on movies) or in movies (Battle Royale is a Japanese movie from 2000).

It's been a point of contention recently, the question of who created battle royale. Perhaps Greene is responsible for the modern iteration of it, but the last-man-standing concept has been around in gaming since Bomberman in 1983. And the concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in 1952 in his classic novel Invisible Man, describing a free-for-all boxing match that the protagonist must participate in. So Brendan Greene didn't come up with this out of thin air, or at least he wasn't the first.

On the other hand, I see no problem with him trying to profit from it either.

Edit: I correct myself -- in Invisible Man, the phrase was "battle royal," not "battle royale." It's still clearly similar however.

It was in wrestling before any of those, too. Mirriam-Webster dates it to 1671.

You are just nit picking. He is talking about the closing circle game mechanics. Yes simple but yet genius.

Bomberman shrank the arena when the matches went to sudden death. Pretty sure others also did this (certainly common in single player games of that era and earlier - arguably Joust with it's rising lava is close to being the first for that sort of thing)

Like almost all game mechanics, I'm fairly sure I saw this in a WC3 custom map half a decade ago.

Or even in a StarCraft (the first one) map. AFAIK, MOBAs were invented in SC/SCBW, and refined with the original DotA - the W3 map.

(Tangentially, I'm still amazed at the variety of gameplay ideas people were testing in SCBW and W3's UMS maps).

lookup H1Z1

also this concept was a minecraft mod called hunger games before that even

PUBG succeeded and vastly popularized the BR genre but it definitely didn't invent it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game#Early_games...

  While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year,[18][19] and is considered the defining game of the genre.

> lookup H1Z1

That's what the grandparent was saying: Brandon Greene, the man mostly responsible for PUBG was also responsible for H1Z1 (SOE licensed the Battle Royale mode from him for H1Z1 and hired him as a consultant): https://www.pcgamer.com/battle-royale-modder-brendan-greene-...

I don't think the question is who started the genre, but who made it commercially viable. And I think pubg gets this

If anything, it's the movies that made it commercially viable, not games that came out later and rode on the wave.

I doubt 50 million people in the West have seen a Japanese cult film, but 50 million people have bought PUBG.

Didn't everyone see Godzilla?

So your problem is that beginners make things and you have to sift through it on day zero without the help of reviews, and/or aren't aware of Steam's generous refund policy.

Excuse me if I find that viewpoint to be very disrespectful to indie developers. I know there is a problem with "asset flippers", but you have to take the good with the bad. Open access is not a bad thing.

Indie devs are honest people just trying to express themselves. If anyone "deserves" anything, it's the indie dev to not be treated like shit by their customers. They don't make games with the intent of getting huge and annoying 1% of the self-identified "hardcore" gamers with their idiosyncrasies. They are just trying to do their best with the resources they have. Sometimes (rarely) they hit on a recipe that captures the zeitgeist and makes them grow way far out of control for what they are prepared for. That doesn't mean they deserve to be bitched at our told they are screwing their customers.

The issue with Dayz, H1Z1 and PUBG was that they were made by developers that 1. knew very little about engine optimizations and 2. rushed to add features as quickly as possible with no foresight.

This lead to all 3 games being laggy, which is quite bad for a shooter. It also lead to the pace of development slowing down to a crawl after a few months, which I assume was due to their spaghetti code being hard to work with.

Epic at least has experience with game engines and development, and have managed to keep up the pace and performance.

PUBG has gotten a lot better the past month, it still has the best feel and fun factor of any FPS out right now.

See you on Vikendi. Bring your snow jacket.

I've heard that exact sentence for the past year plus. I'm sure it IS better, but I'm also sure it's still a mess.

> I'm also sure it's still a mess.

Definitely not. Bugs are not a common occurrence currently, while they were present in every single gaming session I had, even for the last year.

Give it a try, the game is in a great state.

I dunno. I really like Epic and the Fortnite general tone, but as a mobile player I very much prefer PUBG. For one, even with all the talks about bad optimisation, PUBG runs (or at least at the time of launching ran) way better than Fortnite. Fortnite was totally unplayable on iPhone 6S whereas PUBG ran smoothly. Another thing is that Fortnite mixes players from various platforms and thus had to add autofire to the game which ruins the gameplay for me.

Comparing the mobile products is a bit unfair. The mobile version of Fortnite is the same game as the console or PC versions. If you try both the mobile and full version of PUBG it is clear that the mobile version is pretty stripped down. The most obvious difference is probably the interiors of buildings.

It's been a while since I tried it but I recall the mobile Fortnite having control options that let you turn off autofire. I'm also pretty sure that matchmaking between mobile and other platforms is opt-in [0]. You shouldn't be up against PC players when you're on your phone.

[0] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/23/17146848/cross-platform-cr...

While I agree that PUBG is a dumpster heap technically, it really is a legitimately fun game. I enjoy it much more than Fortnite, and if it performed halfway decently it would be one of my favorite games of all time. I think Fortnite's success is great and it is very clear why it is more popular than PUBG could have ever hoped to be, but I will always be partial to the slow, suffocating, horror of feeling alone in that giant world. Not seeing someone for 10 minutes, but always wondering who is around the next corner is thrilling to me and it's something that Fortnite intentionally lacks.

As a big fan of Fortnite I was ready to disagree with you but that's actually spot on. There is a massive difference in the pacing of the two games, and there are audiences for both.

Yeah, a lot of it really comes down to personal preference. PUBG, H1Z1, Fortnite, Blackout, CS:GO... gameplay wise they all have significant differences.

I'd like to add gun mechanics. PUBG has the best gunplay I've ever played. For me PUBG fights are thrilling, like I was there getting shot at, while Fortnite's (or any other game for that matter) are plain old arcadey. I dislike the building mechanic too.

I'd genuinely love for a developer to step up and do a better milsim BR but so far PUBG is king in that niche.

PUBG definitely took a lot of inspiration from Arma's gunplay, although for whatever reason the glitchy jankiness in Arma annoys me less than it does in PUBG. Maybe because the bugs in PUBG tend to have a greater impact on the outcome of fights.

Player Unknown (the PU in PUBG) was a well known Arma modder, so this is entirely unsurprising in that light.

cod blackout is significantly better mechanically, and just as much of a 'milsim.' twitch has largely pivoted already.. CSGO has a BR now, too.

PUBG doesn't have much special left, and its new peers haven't been very successful at unseating fortnite for popularity.

The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.

[0] At the time of writing, fornite has ~10x as many twitch viewers as pubg.

> cod blackout is significantly better mechanically, and just as much of a 'milsim.'

I beg to differ. It has a pretty arcadey gunplay (well... it's CoD). Nowhere near close to PUBG's ballistics. It's pretty much point and click. I can see the appeal, but it's not for me.

Calling it a milsim though...

> twitch has largely pivoted already..

At the time of writing PUBG has more viewers on Twitch.

> PUBG doesn't have much special left

Disagree. It's a niche, but one no game has been able to fill. Every single player I know that left for Blackout ended up coming back to PUBG. It's still its own kind of game.

> The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.

Mate, you don't have to defend Fortnite so vehemently. I know it's probably a great game, I just dislike it and no amount of talking will turn it into my type of game.

Fortnite is free, pubg isn’t. Keep that in mind when comparing.

Tell that to anyone who has a kid playing Fortnite. They're either spending money or declining to spend money constantly. Fortnite is free in the sense that it's free to walk into a bar.

I've really enjoyed my 20hrs+ playing fortnite without spending any money through the platform. I'm happy for other people to pay for useless items and subsidise my experience.

pubg also tries to encourage you to buy cosmetic items, and I know that people's kids feel they have to do this. But I have never paid a dime and I pwn them all the time. The parents should simply tell their kids no, and to git gud. I am a parent too, this isn't at all a hard thing.

PUBG was a truly unique gaming experience. It’s just a shame that they were so slow to rollout maps and make basic mechanical changes early enough. I got oversaturated and haven’t played it in about a year. Just can’t dedicate 15 mins on a single match to die from technical shortcomings.

It was the multiple gigabyte steam updates that ruined this game for my group of friends. Coming home from work to find that someone has four hours worth of downloads before you could all play together? We moved on to more reliable pastures.

Try it again, it's come so far in the past year. They've also just released a new snow map. I've been playing for more than a year now and I've never had more fun than I'm having now. For the first time in a year, its playerbase is starting to grow again also: https://steamcharts.com/app/578080

I play PUBG Mobile, so slightly different to PUBG on Desktop. It is free, and it is fun. And it is one of those rare games you can finish the match in 5 - 10 min times when you are in Arcade Mode. There is no grind, no VIP system, No Pay to win. I actually brought a few items in App because I thought I was enjoying it so much and not paying for it.

I hope Fortnite and PUBG will finally wake Apple up, I mean even Phill Schiller is playing Fortnite [1]. Gaming is driving the PC sales, Mac needs to take notes.

[1] https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/1077319181027004417

That's ironic, because PubG was miles better optimized and looking than DayZ Standalone or the mod.

funnier still, Fortnite initially was piggy-backing off DayZ the zombie survival formula ...

That's true! I heard it termed as a minecraft-meets-DayZ.

I've been a fan of the "battlegrounds" gameplay mode since I played on Arma 2 Battle Royale servers back in 2012. I'm really glad they became mainstream enough for me to start sucking at them.

I thought pubg was a remarkable technical achievement, especially after years of tolerating bugs and jank in Arma.

PUBG is a technical mess (but getting better). However, it's a marvel of game design, especially if you've spent more than a few hundred hours playing. The design of the new map (Vikendi) is insanely good (save for a few issues with loot spawning) — in size, topography, speed, etc.

They've been able to capture the realistic military style sim, but without the massive player overhead required to learn and be good at those games. The gun mechanics are some of, if not the best I've ever played.

PUBG has helped me recover from anxiety & panic attacks.

Background: I had undergone a major cervical spine fusion surgery to avoid becoming quadriplegic[1] & have been forced to close my startup which I have been running for ~ 5 years. I have been facing anxiety & panic attacks ~ 3 months after surgery.

I had decided to try gaming to aid with the recovery from panic attacks & also to monitor the dexterity of my fingers. I looked for multiplayer TPS games with some realism & accurate weapon mechanics. Fortnite was too colourful & lacked realistic maps (IMO); so I chose PUBG.

Initial game sessions made my anxiety worse, especially when a sniper takes you out (or) the impending threat of it. After several sessions, I've learnt to be calm & have improved my tactics.

I can definitely say that playing PUBG has definitely helped me recover from my anxiety & panic attacks. Of-course, this might have been the case even if I had played other games including Fornite; but as I said PUBG served my needs.

[1]: https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...

Pardon the off-topic, but hello, stranger!

So glad I found someone else who also got help from games for their anxiety and panic attacks. I've also undergone some crappy health-related stuff this year and the only thing which I believe pulled me out of it and fixed my crippling anxiety while I recovered was Just Cause 3. I think it was the wingsuit flying coupled with the open-world exploration. It was basically the only activity which could bring my heart rate down to the 60s (It's very counter-intuitive, even for me, how a fast-paced game managed to calm me down) . Not even reading had this effect on me. My friends don't play games and I'm not social at all (twitch, xbox, etc..) so I'm very glad I see someone else in a similar situation.

Hello!

Sounds great, BTW there was a reddit AMA from a therapist who researches the intersection of video games & mental health[1] the comments section includes several people who share similar experience as us.

I'm planning to try out JC3 for it's interesting game mechanics as you pointed out. One thing I noticed after getting hooked to PUBG was, story based gaming doesn't interest me anymore; I used to be an avid gamer before my entrepreneurial commitments, I would definitely finish the games.

Not sure if it is 'endless' nature of PUBG or similar games, which doesn't give the content of having finished a game; makes one hooked to them. I had got NieR:Automata for it's philosophical adventure, but I didn't get back to it since I touched PUBG.

P.S I wish good health for you in the coming years.

[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9jona3/i_am_a_therapi...

This is really interesting a surprising to read. I play fortnite and I feel like overall it has raised my stress levels a bit. Maybe I need to learn from you and practice being calm, or just get better at the game :)

Hi, yes gaming stress is real! & my efforts to overcome it helped me with gaming & more importantly outside gaming in real life.

Being calm, breathing, mindfulness helped me.

I think you're missing a lot of what contributed to Fortnite's success. Namely their ripping off of pretty much every one of Valve's most lucrative decisions of the past 10 years and in principle - Free to play.

Fortnite was pretty much a failure when it first launched. Sure they copied PUBG's last-man-standing game mode, but what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game.

You could get it, play it, and then upgrade or not upgrade your character as you desired. This is what made it so wildly popular with its base audience of 7-15 year olds. They can't drive, they don't have money, they might have hyper controlling parents that won't let them go out and be proper kids, but if they have a desktop and a reliable internet connection, they can be a part of this game. That's a big selling point for kids. Not to mention if they watch Twitch/Youtube, it would appear to be a potential career path for them to sit on their ass consuming content in an interesting way as they see people like Ninja and Muselk getting rich.

As for Fortnite's financial success, again I think this comes down to them ripping off Valve - principally Team Fortress 2. When Valve made the game free to play in 2011, they added other monetization mechanisms like premium cosmetics and taunts. This is exactly how Fortnite has become so huge.

Instead of having major entrance barriers like having to own a console or forking over $60 - $100 for a game. You can get it for free and maybe pay a few bucks here or there when it suits you. And parents love it because it gives them a passive way to control their kids at little to no cost. (Unless their the absurd type of people who pay for Fortnite tutors)

Not that Gabe Newell or Valve need the money, but Epic has ripped off almost everything from other games for Fortnite. With their massive budget they're basically like Facebook in that they can steal any concept to be produced in house and fight legal battles as necessary. And I think their success compared to what they've ripped off is largely a matter of timing with the rise of services like Twitch, Youtube and Discord than anything specific to their IP.

Not even a desktop; a phone, tablet, console, and god knows what else they release it on.

I think another major contributor to Fortnite’s success is the scale of cross-platform play that we’ve rarely seen before. Chances are if you have a thing that can connect to the internet, that thing is capable of running Fortnite.

They’re like Facebook not just because they have the money to steal any concept and build it in house, but because in some ways they are a social network. It’s as much as a game as a platform to hang out with your friends and chill.

Yeah definitely. When I said "a desktop" I was trying to say pretty much any desktop, even you mom's 15 year old Dell Dimension desktop, which many phones these days are more powerful than - and the majority of Fortnite's players are younger than.

I also agree about the social network angle, the one area Epic has really shined is their season and special event model. While other games have special events and it's really nothing new, the consistency with which Epic produces them creates a constant buzz around the product. Like rugrat water-cooler talk. And some of their events only last a day or two, so if you take a week off for a vacation, you may miss some major thing that your friends may be talking about for who knows how long. Granted this might be intentional addiction fostering aimed at kids by Epic.

Anything except Linux apparently.

Unreal Engine works on linux, and Fortnite used to work through wine, but because of their anti-cheating system it's broken now, and their CEO doesnt seem to have any plans for the linux version, he has some weird stance [1] on that.

Such a bummer, I really wanted to play it.

[1] https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698

I'm going to make an assumption and say that you may have strong feelings against Fortnite, and maybe feel as though it has wronged other longstanding titles. This may be incorrect, but regardless your statements regarding Fortnite and Epic Games are a bit misleading.

To begin with, comparing Fortnite to what Valve has been doing lately is a bit strange. Valve has recently focused less on being a developement company and more on their platform/marketplace (Steam) which is the primary driver of their success. Valve in the last few years has been for the most part fairly been irrelevant in the game development industry. A more apt comparison would be Epic and Bluehole (which both created the most popular Battle Royales).

You also state that that Fortnite was both a "failure when it first launched" and "what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game." Fortnite's Co-Op PvE ran an alpha back in 2014[0], and only entered Early Access in 2017[1] (which cost $40). By no metric was it a failure, and comparing the pre-free to play numbers to after it got popular (with a totally different gamemode) is unfair. Fortnite's free to play battle royale gamemode was not a failure and grew extremely quickly after it's release[2].

What made the game popular with its base audience (initially popular with adults and teenagers and only later being picked up by kids) was the fresh and unique take on a new genre (Battle Royale) that was extremely easy to pick up. It definitely wasn't that they could upgrade their character's cosmetics, a option available in basically every multiplayer. Fornite's financial success does come from selling cosmetics, but implying that cosmetics in video games was an idea developed by Valve is laughable. Sales of virtual goods in video games has a very long history[3].

Fortnite popularized (and capitalized on) a fresh genre, which combined with a low barrier to entry, revolutionized the gaming industry and generated immense wealth for Epic, which struck gold with the game. If it wasn't Fortnite, another well made Battle Royale could have easily overtaken the genre in a similar manner. Fortnite was simply in the right place, at the right time, with the right devs. And they've been rewarded handsomely for it.

[0] https://www.polygon.com/2014/12/1/7316937/fortnite-alpha-sig... [1] https://www.vg247.com/2017/07/21/fortnite-early-access-has-s... [2] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_goods#History

One thing I'm glad they didn't "rip off" from Team Fortress 2 are the gambling loot boxes where you pay $2 for one try which has a 0.02% chance of netting you a $1500 item.

What’s your point? Fortnite combines elements from many other games and you call this a ripoff? This is how "art" is created in many cases. F2P has been around for a long time, so what?

Awesome comment! One thing I have problem with is that you keep saying "ripping off" or "steal". There really shouldn't be any shame in taking 2 existing good ideas and using them to make something better, something widely successful.

TF2 or PUBG could've done this but didn't, fortnite did, and nailed it, and now we all get to benefit.

Especially as Battle Royale modes already existed before PUBG as well.

Pubg has a lot of genius to it that people don’t notice because the implementation was buggy. If you play the game a lot you start to appreciate how good the gunplay is, the weapon balance, the layout of the maps. Every building and bush is carefully considered. Ever notice a tree branch often obscures a window you want to peek? No accident!

That's just good production values that most AAA shooters like CoD and Battlefield have. AAA studios can iterate, hire top talent and do a lot of QA testing, so naturally elements like gunplay, weapon balance and map design can be top notch.

I think the genius in PUBG can be found more in seeing the opportunity of creating a standalone realistic Battle Royale shooter at the right time.

> PUBG - an unqualified mess from a subpar developer

Wow, you're bitter. Are you talking about Brendan Greene or Chang-han Kim? They wanted to get the game out quickly and with a low budget, and they achieved just that! It's strange to be dissing individual creators of a very successful product in comparison to a big company like Epic games.

Fortnite's pivot from failed co-op zombie game to... well, this... is incredible.

I would love to have experienced that office environment over that year. I can only imagine that the pivot was a "well, we already have most of the game. What can do we do with it?" hail Mary as they considered what to do short of closure.

I may also be misremembering how dire their situation was. But I thought it was quite dire.

Fortnite may have been dire as a product, but Epic was surely not in any kind of trouble as a company.

It's really odd to watch people see them as "the Fortnite company" and ignore/discount the Unreal engine, etc.

It just completely skips my mind that Epic has more going on for them than games. Not that I've really tried to understand their business units or offering.

I actually see them as the ZZT company.

Oh man, for some reason Epic Games and Epic MegaGames were distinct in my head. Two companies, one which made ZZT, Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit, and the other which starts with Unreal.

I loved ZZT back in the day.

> Jazz Jackrabbit

Wow that's a name I haven't heard in ages. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was one of my favourite games growing up.

Ha, same. That’s always the first thing that comes to mind.

I was programming before ZZT, but it definitely solidified some things in my head, despite its limitations.

There's a ton of ZZT mods out in the world BTW. It's kind of amazing what was possible with such a limited environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZU4wR86h1E

I learned quite a bit from the simple message passing in ZZT-OOP as well as some about timing and inserting new information into logic loops. Most of my programs were closer to what would be done in Twine today, which makes me optimistic about the generation of future programmers that framework is creating.

I heard battle royale mode was added in a hack week by developers, but I don’t know the whole story

The situation for Fortnite as it was may have been dire, but as a company I imagine UE4 licensing would have kept them in business at the very least.

After Unreal Tournament 3 and Unreal Tournament 4 ( still pre-alpha) you could probably extend that 'dire' 'office environment..' to quite a few years.

I think it is commendable that Epic used some of this profit to change their Unreal Engine Marketplace rates in favour of the developers. Similar to their store that is mentioned in the article, the revenue split is now 88/12.

This change will be applied retroactively to all past transactions [1]. My understanding is the split was previously 70/30 as common in other online stores—those should be some hefty payouts for some developers. In my opinion this is going above and beyond and would make me feel good about supporting Epic through purchase of cosmetics in Fortnite if I played the game, for example.

EDIT: I previously mistakenly referred to the UE Marketplace as store, which is now at best misleading since they did launch a proper game store last month. Thanks to jsnell for catching this.

[1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-announces-unrea...

I'm confused, Epic just launched their store this month. What games are these "previous transactions" for? Do you have a specific list of games that sold with the previous 70/30 cut, and for how long?

EDIT: From what I remember, the only games on the Epic launcher were Unreal Tournament, Paragon, Fortnite and Shadow Complex.

The OP was talking about the Unreal Engine Marketplace (for selling game assets to developers), not about the Epic Games store (for selling finished games to players).

I see the source of your confusion though, since the article was never talking about the UE Marketplace.

It appears I didn't parse the article correctly myself. Thanks for catching this, I'll edit the OP to be clear on this.

Eh, that move is definitely nice for developers, but it's still self-serving. They're in an uphill battle against steam's moat, and increasing rates is a way of attracting more developers.

Sure, but even going to 25 or 20 percent would have been big. To go all the way down to 12% is absurd (though as a game dev I'm certainly not complaining!)

The UE Marketplace is targeted at developers only and sells assets and such for use in UE games. I was not aware that Steam is competing in that area at all and a cursory search didn't yield any such results.

Of course other marketplaces selling assets exist, but I am not aware that one has a dominant market position that Epic are trying hard to surpass. Please do let me know if that is, in fact, the case.

Or are you implying that better rates in the Marketplace will also make it more likely for developers to publish their games on the Epic Store (disregarding the better rates there)?

They are talking about the Steam-competing store Epic launched recently:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/

It's pretty empty now but I'll be shocked if it doesn't have thousands of games within the next 3 years.

The store is closely curated by Epic, and that - the quality of game selection - was their main pitch for the gamers.

It's still possible that they will exhaust a pool of good games and start listing random junk for $100 like Steam does, but that's not likely to happen that quickly.

Seems like Steam could pretty much fix that problem if they changed the fee to $200, and doled out $@-$5 credits to random people that reviewed similarly tagged games along with a copy of the game that's good for 5-10 hours before needing to be purchased (or until a certain date), as long as they give a thorough review of what they were able to see.

Steam already tracks time played in the game, so it's not like they would have to add a bunch of mechanics to track extra stuff, and this would allow for some fairly good initial reviews to be seeded.

That's what I understood as well.

What I was, however, trying to figure out is how they think the rates of the marketplace will influence the traffic on the (mostly) separate store.

After all, Epic could have had 88/12 rates for the store, but kept their 70/30 split for their Marketplace.

>I think it is commendable that Epic used some of this profit to change their Unreal Engine Marketplace rates in favour of the developers

Now if only they made the marketplace actually available to developers. There is literally no way for me to buy assets from my Linux workstation. They disabled the ability to buy from their webpage to push people through their launcher, but they refuse to release it on Linux for some reason. I guess they don't mind the missed sales? It's pretty much the reason why I ditched it for Unity.

My workstation is now win 10 to run UE4 and use the marketplace and ubuntu in VMWare for everything on the backend for this very reason.

There are a couple hacks out there to get your assets after you have bought them but you still have to buy them from the windows marketplace.

Epic can do 88/12 without gift cards. After paying retailers for selling Steam gift cards, Valve gets less than 30.

Of course they loose some money on the gift cards, but I highly doubt it's anywhere close to 18% of the value for most retailers. I was not able to find a public source on any numbers here, but I asked a friend working at a large 8-letter games store and he mentioned figures in the range of 5%.

Furthermore I am not speaking of the recently launched game store, but the UE Marketplace that sells assets targeted at developers. As mentioned in a reply to a sibling of yours, I am not aware that Steam or other large game distribution platforms are competing in this market. Hence I am not sure why their rates are relevant here.

Retailers discount Apple iTunes gift cards 20%.

This might be a regional thing, but I have never seen iTunes gift cards discounted where I'm from (Germany). What I've seen is that if you buy a gift card at face value, they give you an extra gift card for 10-15% of the value. And I've not once seen such a promotion for any non-iTunes gift card.

This approach leads me to assume that that either happens in co-operation with Apple, who are eating the extra cost for the special promotion, or the stores are paying out of their marketing budget for a loss leader.

I don't have any experience with the gift card markets in any other country, so things might just be different here. Either way this is all hypotheticals since I still can't find any good hard numbers.

EDIT: Of course you also need to take into account that not all sales in the stores are paid for though gift cards.

The interesting part of this article was that Epic intentionally circumvented Google Play Store and required Android users to download the launcher from its own website. Hopefully this leads to more app developers skipping Google Play and launching solo. Of course most apps won't have the name recognition of Fortnite, but I can't imagine discover-ability inside of the Play Store is any better.

I got a new phone recently and had to re-download some apps; Imagine my shock when I opened Google Play and saw that it had become like Google search; crawling with ads for some of the worst, lowest-rung "apps", all of which appear to be some variant of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. Who honestly wants to fork over 30% to Google for that?

The Apple store is just as bad. I tried finding an app that just takes a photo every n seconds until I press stop.

I could find endless pages of apps that claimed to do this - but had 1-star ratings because they couldn't actually do the single thing they were supposed to do.

Ugh. I remain pretty convinced that there's an app like this out there, but discovering it is just plain impossible.

Hmm, I’ve been looking for an iOS project idea recently...

Seems like something one could crank out in a weekend. But I’m with you on discovery. Finding something that isn’t going to disappoint me gets harder with time.

Please poke me at lwahonen@gmail.com if you ever make one :)

I’ve given up on searching the App Store, but I’ve had a lot of luck searching the web. This article looks relevant and useful: https://iphonephotographyschool.com/iphone-time-lapse/

IIRC none of those just place the photos in the iPhone gallery. They only give you the finished video.

I tried looking into making this myself, but it’s an insane rabbit’s hole of Cocoapod compilation problems and general yak shawing. A kingdom for a bash shell and a few good cli tools..

OSnap Pro can do it. I just bought it to confirm.

The workflow is a little counterintuitive but not hard. I created a video to illustrate. There are also quite a few settings I didn’t show, such as image quality, frame limit, blackout periods, etc.

Since it’s very late all you get is me pointing it around the entrance to my hotel room, but the images are captured by the configurable timer, not me directly.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0hBeG0SI7u7iFu2NmOoM8Y6oQ#Ce...

Why not just make a Siri Shortcut? This took five minutes: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/7b14ee82c76d4d64902b5e26a69...

Shame none of that is going towards UT development and Epic scrapped that project. Considering the state of the new Quake game I guess that's the end for Arena shooters.

It's too bad, but arena shooters have been dying as a category ever since around UT3. I'm hopeful they'll make a resurgence in the future.

I thought Quake Champions would be the best chance for the genre to be revived. With how popular LoL and DotA and Overwatch are, it seemed like a mix of the traditional arena shooter with special abilities/spells would be a good way to attract that audience. It hasn't. Maybe because Bethesda's efforts still lean too heavily on traditional Quake and they're unwilling to really embrace the RPG/ability aspect of MOBAs. Unfortunately, so many developers have tried and failed to make a "modern" arena shooter that I don't see anybody else giving it an interesting, worthy take on a hybrid.

The failure of QC has nothing do with them not embracing the RPG/ability aspect of MOBAs, that was always just a gimmick anyways (when QC introduced gametypes without abilities they ended up being more popular). It has everything to do with Bethesda utterly mismanaging the entire project into the ground. They hired Saber Interactive (probably the cheapest studio they could find) instead of going with more expensive in-house development with iD. The engine is a frankenstein monster of old iDtech with Saber's console-oriented crap piled on top and the result is woeful performance, memory leaks, desync, and laughable netcode all of which has not been addressed in the 2 years it's been in "beta". Add in the cancerous "games as a service" model that does not allow for any custom content, maps, or community servers (which were always the lifeblood of quake) and there you have it

Yeah, I think there are a LOT of reasons. It's just a bad game. Seems like a cash grab more than an actual desire to make a good quake game. Reminds me a lot of Street Fighter 5 vs SF4.

It's not a gimmick. It's where I see the only chance for arena shooters. Maybe Bethesda treated it that way, but I genuinely believe that's the only hope there is considering how popular MOBAs are.

You might be right considering how poorly "pure" arena shooters have done despite being excellent games (Reflex Arena for example). Personally I prefer to have an even playing field when I play a competitive game, but it seems like I'm in the minority nowadays.

There's a lot of game design baggage that big IP titles just can't resist including, I'd expect an arena revival to come from an indie shop trying new things and importantly leaving out a lot of other things.

I wouldn't mind seeing Tribes sledding in more stuff though.

"Skiing" -- a physics bug that could cancel out friction with the ground, which (together with the game's wide open terrain and jetpacks) was so beloved by the community that it became the identifying movement mechanic of the franchise.

Whoops, embarrassing slip of the tongue with a different winter activity...

To make up for it here's an article for those interested in implementing Tribes physics with skiing. It's not really just some notion of "friction = 0". https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/tribes-1-physic...

Arena shooters are "dying" for the same reason chess isn't as popular as online poker. Back in the day arena shooter popularity was because there was no low hanging fruit alternative like modern military shooters or Fortnite of today. But it turns out most people don't want to either participate in or watch games of absolute skill. The former requires a lot of commitment to get good at it, and there is no randomness or luck to make you feel you are better than you are - just your own ability. The later is reflected in the former, in how complex interations and difficulty make watching really skillful games harder because there is so much to account for deterministically.

Thats what gravitates people towards randomness in games, where skill is taken out of the equation. Then you don't have to practice or actually "be good", you could just get lucky, and thats enough for most people - they aren't looking for challenges in their games, just dopamine kicks, and we are wired enough to get similar effects to chance we get to perseverance and the former doesn't require the hard work.

Arena shooters are alive and thriving. Quake Champions Doom Edition[1] is a miracle mod that is incredible to see and play knowing its running on what started as the first breakout PC shooter of all time. But its not a commercial product. Its a fan game. But its just as good, or better, than what almost any big budget arena shooter could offer, because they are not about spectacle at all, they are about the tightness and responsiveness of the gameplay.

[1] https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-champions-doom-edition

> Thats what gravitates people towards randomness in games, where skill is taken out of the equation. Then you don't have to practice or actually "be good", you could just get lucky, and thats enough for most people - they aren't looking for challenges in their games, just dopamine kicks, and we are wired enough to get similar effects to chance we get to perseverance and the later doesn't even require hard work to get there.

That's how many people feel about the abilities in QC, yet you linked a QC style mod. Are the abilities toned down in the mod compared to how they are in QC?

> Then you don't have to practice or actually "be good", you could just get lucky, and thats enough for most people - they aren't looking for challenges in their games, just dopamine kicks

I don't think you understand how either type of games work. You really believe "dopamine kicks" play a bigger role in casual games than in hardcore ones?

More casual games lean on the fact that there are more aspects to derive fun and value from than just being "better" (being "good" is relative) or just overcoming challenge. Skill, practice and challenge all play a part even in casual games, they simply are not such overpowering factors compared to hardcore experiences.

Anyone with any sense of these games work would see that modern games like Fortnite or Overwatch take more skill than typical arena shooters. You still need to have the raw mechanical aim skill, but now there are a host of other mechanical, tactical and cooperative skills to master on top of that.

>You still need to have the raw mechanical aim skill

Not even close to the extent you need to have it for a fast-paced AFPS. Watch some top-level quake gameplay and compare it to top-level Overwatch gameplay, it's night and day. Hell, some OW characters even aim for you or don't need to aim at all to be effective (Winston for example)

>but now there are a host of other mechanical, tactical and cooperative skills to master on top of that

Cooperation sure, OW does put more of an emphasis on teamwork. But as far as mechanical and tactical skill goes I don't see how you can make that argument unless you've never played an AFPS

It also doesn't help that almost all arena shooters support cooperative team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc. The only difference is a lack of role specialization between teammates.

But the scene isn't as big for those as it is for 1v1, because its already overwhelming trying to track two people operating at peak performance, let alone 8 or 12. Its a niche of a niche.

The gameplay of games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 3 Fortress and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was very satisfying because they felt like arena shooters (due to their use of the Quake 3 engine) but were early examples of games having role specialization.

I can't speak about Fortnite, but movement in Overwatch is in general easier than in arena shooters, no? No bunny-hopping, no explosive jumping, apparently no airstrafing now either ...?

Having played shooters since the arena shooter days... no, I definitely disagree.

I like to compare arena shooters vs. Fortnite/Overwatch as chess vs. Settlers of Catan. Arena shooters were much more "open play" in the sense that there were few enough game mechanics that you could mostly guess your opponents' tactics and it often came down to execution and minute variations in the gameplay.

The newer shooters add many, many game mechanics that complicate and randomize the game. Overwatch's large stable of characters, for example. This creates a problem where part of your skill is reading matchups from an intractably large number of factors, then executing on it.

I don't consider either to be superior, but the games put emphasis on and reward different skills.

There was a lot of meta-game you could not grasp as a newb in arena-shooters. You heard the opponent grab the shotgun shells, you knew he could either reach door a or door b in 5 seconds. So you grenade launched into Door A and flung yourself at Door B.

For newcomers this resulted in dying horrible most of the time, all the time.

Karaoke is more popular than playing in a symphony orchestra. Having a higher skill check / barrier of entry doesn't make the hobby any more entertaining.

> chess isn't as popular as online poker.

Why do you think this?

I still have hope for Diabotical if it ever comes out. It has the seal of approval from Cypher which says a lot to me.

Is anybody else bummed how Fortnite's success has drawn development away from the new Unreal Tournament? I don't care about Fortnite, I just want UT to continue to be updated. I don't think it's had an update since June.

Not just drawn development away, but they are no longer developing it.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/development-stopped-unr...

Oh no, sad to hear this. Still regularly shoot around with my gf on classic UT2004...

A guy upthread is mentioning quake champions doom edition as an alternative

Epic lied to Linux devs and stabbed us in the back. I have abandoned hundreds in marketplace assets and moved to godot because of all that money and still a refusal to address Linux as a platform for dev and shipping.

I see several people complain about Linux limitations in this thread. What are the Linux limitations exactly? A) Unreal dev tools can't be used on Linux, B) Unreal dev tools can't be used to purchase marketplace assets on Linux, C) Unreal dev tools can't use marketplace assets on Linux even if you previously bought them on Windows, D) Unreal dev tools on Windows can't make a Linux build if it uses marketplace assets.

What exactly did they lied? In terms of Dev?

Tim Sweeney often complains about MS being a threat to PC gaming, yet there is still no Fortnite for Linux. Also, Epic store doesn't support Linux (yet?).

I mean come on, it has got to be a business decision. If Gamers were there, they would have made it. How much investment do you expect them to make when only 1% of the world wide Desktop uses linux and possibly less than 10% of that 1% are gamers?

I mean Mac Gamers don't complain as much when they have higher market shares.

If he is so threatened, his business decision should be to do something about it. Valve did, and push Linux gaming quit a lot. Epic do it very lazily. Good thing their Unreal engine works on Linux, but they didn't put a lot of effort in it. Lot's was done by third party and community developers to make it work.

Hopefully this shows others that you can make successful games without pay to win mechanics.

Of course there are games that already have proven this, most notably League of Legends (which is also mentioned in the article).

I'm thinking candy crush was pre-league of legends. It brought in $1B revenue for 2018, which is the highest ever and still growing.

League of Legends has been around since 2009, versus Candy Crush Saga in 2012.

Wow I had to look this up. Didn't know it was so big still.

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/candy-crush-saga-1-bill...

Huh? LoL is blatantly P2W, they sell two kinds of in-game advantages.

What are those?

Heroes. A good hero selection is p2w because you may not have a reasonable counter to xyz enemy. They used to sell Runes too (I believe an update made this invalid). Of course, you can get all this stuff for free just by playing 100s of hours, if you have the time/will.

Champion advantages can be mitigated with playstyle and itemization. You can do well in League without having too many characters; Champs aren't hard counters to each other in the same way Dota heroes can be. Buying a certain champion is no guarantee of victory, especially if you don't play them well. Skill plays a much larger role than the champ you play.

As for runes, IIRC you couldn't buy them with the paid currency, Only with the currency earned from playing. It's a moot point since they merged runes and masteries anyways.

It's true that this disadvantage can be mitigated but we should be clear. Riot does limit your play style if you choose not to pay (or grind to get certain champions).

You don't have the same pool of characters as other players who've chosen to pay for their favorite champions and this is clearly a disadvantage.

This is different from games like, say, Overwatch, where the entire hero pool is available to everyone (different game, sure but the point stands).

Don't you need to pay for "champs" in LoL? That sounds very P2W to me.

You do, but the points needed to buy a new champ (I believe it's 6,300 IP) doesn't take too long to get.

All champions, including the free ones on rotation, are balanced with each other (in theory); there is no real-money-only-champion with blatantly-boosted stats as is often in more P2W variants.

See Jarwain's comment in a sister thread.

Champions buy you playstyle, not straight advantage. At best, they give you options - but by the time you have played enough that a reasonably varied roster improves your chances to win, you have earned plenty to afford a varied roster. If you pay for hero it's because you want that hero, not because you need it.

Getting down-voted by LoL fanboys is pretty funny.

Riot is notorious for releasing new heroes that are behind a paywall and that are overpowered.

Dota2, CS:GO, team fortress 2

The gaming industry fortunately figured out awhile ago that P2W mechanics in non-mobile games won't fly. (which is why Star Wars: Battlefront II got amazing backlash when they tried to sneak it in)

Steam has been doing this for awhile. CS:GO, DotA2, etc come to mind.

Steam is a product, Valve is the company.

TF2 was arguably Valve’s first testbed in this space.

TF2 was their first major release that was free-to-play with purchasable cosmetic items, but their games have never been pay-to-win. They were historically pay-once-to-own, free to continue playing.

Not sure where I mentioned it being pay-to-win? I put ~1500 hours into TF2...

Tf2 is somewhat pay to win. You can buy additional weapons with different stats or abilities.

Sounds like you haven’t played it much.

Firstly, stock weapons are typically the strongest among each class.

Secondly, you can get every item in the game without spending a dime via one of the following: 1) the drop system, 2) the crafting system, or 3) trading.

I have about 250 hours in it, but I stopped playing in 2013. At the time, I found the drop system to be pretty unrewarding unless you paid for keys (or just bought what you want). Has it changed since then?

Yes, it has changed a lot since then. Most significantly, Valve did a ton of re-balancing, making stock weapons even more viable in regular play.

> Firstly, stock weapons are typically the strongest among each class.

While this is partially true, there's also a large set of items that are straight upgrades especially in competitive. The Cruisader's Crossbow, Ubersaw, Escape Plan and Gunboats are just a few examples of completely superior weapons and while their usage in casual isn't as wide spread you'd be hard pressed to find to find a serious competitive match where these aren't all being preferred.

There are also an assortment of weapons that are banned by competitive leagues because they practically break 6v6 gameplay. A good example is the wrangler + Rescue Ranger combo. With a good engineer it makes it practically impossible to kill a sentry.

I still agree with you that this doesn't make TF2 PTW for the other reasons you've listed, but it's occasionally been a problem in competitive when players don't have the "required" unlocks or the item servers are down.

> Hopefully this shows others that you can make successful games without pay to win mechanics.

Overwatch also has zero pay-to-win mechanics.

I want to like overwatch, I really do, but on my Ubuntu system with an AMD RX 550, it just lags, and lags, and lags. The other modes all work fine. I'm hoping it just needs some updates..

WoT proved it 8 years ago.

World of Tanks? It was definitely pay to skip the grind.

Well, duh. It's a completely different model than pay 2 win.

> Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year

What does this even mean? Net income? Top line gross profit (meaning minus COGS), which is normally like 80% GM for heavily software enabled businesses? Ugh, tech reporters.

Pure profit after taxes apparently.

Yes, gross profit is usually understood as revenue minus cogs. But it doesn't seem like the reporter is using it correctly here.

I'm about 63%* sure the reporter is referring to revenue.

* made up number

Revenue and profit are two entirely different things. If it says profit, I feel like it's more likely it's profit rather than revenue.

You must be new to TechCrunch articles.

    > What does this even mean? Net income?

Not sure what exactly it means, but it sounds like A LOT.

The number of employees at Epic appears to be ~700. I do hope that the people who did the work are getting paid handsomely. They should be, right?

My guess would be that they don't actually know. The $3 billion figure itself seems to be an estimate; there are no references to what the figure was last year. Additionally, Epic makes more stuff than just Fortnite, and the article didn't bother to even try to attribute income to anything other than Fortnite.

I had to read the article twice, because at first I was also confused as to whether they were referring to operating income or net income. Epic is a private company so they aren't making their income statements public.

I'm really happy they're so successful. My son loves it, and from my perspective it's "healthier" than more realistic games like Call of Duty (for his age, I mean. nothing inherently wrong with CoD). All that said, I really don't get the appeal. Although I come from a gaming history that values deep and lore-heavy CRPG & ARPG games. From that perspective I don't see a lot of depth to fortnite, where success seems driven by twitch reflexes and very similar end-games for most matches. That said I love the temporary special features they do. My son & I had a blast jetting around, sniping each other when rocket packs were available, and The infinity gauntlet tie-in was really fun. Anyway, good on Epic!

Tim Sweeney is a good person, good for him

I can confirm. We wrote couple of games together in 1995-98 (Fire Fight being the biggest). He is genuinely a good guy.

Fire Fight! That's a blast from the past. I remember being amazed by how cool it looked and felt to play when I was 12 or 13.

Yup, been some fun to write. We did it in Cracow Poland, no internet, barely any money, these were times!

ZZT was such an influential game/editor for me.

I just wish they woulda stuck with his original "Epic MegaGames" name, much better to have a funny name than one that can be read as a bit too self-important.

I’m rather surprised that whiz kids like Sweeny and Carmack often end up becoming excellent executives as well.

What is Carmack up to these days? Last I heard he was still fiddling with VR stuff and doing rocket hobbyist projects on the side?

Fortnite makes over a million dollars a day... ON iOS ALONE.

They've built a money machine.

I'm surprised it made so much money. The game is free. Do people really pay much for the skins/characters?

Mostly by stealing mom's card.

You can also buy something called a "battlepass", which gives you access to additional challenges every week. By completing these challenges, you can earn additional cosmetic items.

Yeah, it's nuts. My son plays a lot and seems only mildly interested in skins. AFAIK there is no game advantage to any of the things that you can buy.

Used to do a call center job for the unfamous EA.

Back then (and it still probably is), FIFA Ultimate Team was all the rage.

What's FUT : a bunch of e-cards of players to get from packages you buy or you trade with players.

You can spend 20 bucks but you can also spend hundreds, if not thousands to get your collection.

I remember reading that the average player spends $80 on DLC for Fortnite — so there are a lot of people out there spending well over that to bring up the average from all those $0 players.

"Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018"

$3B profit doesn’t really seem consistent with $15B valuation. Tech companies these days seem valued at 20x revenue or more. Why would they bother raising $1.25B at that price?

I suppose Fortnite is a fad, so there is a pessimistic case to be made to cash in as much as possible.

”Tech companies” is a wide umbarella. An enterprise-oriented SaaS can justify a high multiplier like that, because their churn rate is low. Video games are a much more volatile business, and the valuation multiplier reflects that.

The impression I get is that the video game industry is extremely hit / miss.

Hence the large graveyard of publishers and developers who at one time made excellent, well-selling games. (E.g. Interplay Games)

Money comes cheaply at times of hits. Money comes much more expensively at times of misses. So it behooves Epic to build up a war chest if they can.

It does speak to a pretty conservative mindset - when you just made $3B cash free and clear, selling some of that golden goose for $1.25B.

Growing tech companies are valued at 20x revenue. Mature companies aren't. Epic was in trouble and managed one hit, that revenue isn't guaranteed to last, hence the conservative valuation.

if Fortnite is a fad, is the moba genre a fad as well? Because LoL and Dota2 seem to still be going strong.

The $3B figure is an estimate. Techcrunch doesn't have the real numbers. That would explain why they don't compare the $3B to Epic's 2017 numbers; because they don't have those either.

You forgot about Unreal engine?

Presumably the $3B already includes that revenue.

The gaming market is fickle, next year we will be talking about something else.

Guess everyone got a nice bonus this holiday season jeez

By "everyone" I assume you mean investors and upper management.

Eh its a tech company. Bonuses usually make their way down to the lower ranks too.

Meaning they will be provided with free beverages.

And my favorite perk - “unlimited vacation”. Nevermind the social stigma is so strong against taking vacation that employees use far less than if they were just given a certain number of vacation days.

True story .. took 1 PTO per month.. took total of 3 in 4 months I was told I'm abusing it and no longer available to me

Unreal Engine is honestly awesome. I recently purchased an AAA game called “DB FighterZ,” built on UE, and the game experience is top-notch.

It piqued my interest in game programming once again.

One of the best thing about Fortnite is EPIC porting back all the work and improvement to Unreal Engine, if any of those Unreal Engine Release note improvement seems crazy, since Fortnite it has been insane. And there are still many more to come.

At this stage Makes me wonder if Unreal Engine will ever get a major competitor for AAA games. Even Konami are ditching the Fox engine and moving to Unreal.

> ...has popularized the battle royale category — think Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games — almost single-handedly...

Almost single-handedly? This is a bizarre claim and it's like rewriting history.

This can be debated. Although Rust/H1Z1/PUBG were certainly popular battle royale games before Fortnite, Fortnite was the only one that brought it mainstream, outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem.

Battle royal was already popular enough for Epic to drop everything they had and shift focus to the genere without any doubt that it was the correct thing to do. To give them credit for the popularity of the genre is to rewrite history.

This is exactly it! Fortnite was a team based fps/rts before it saw the cash cow that is the Battle Royale.

Wasn't the iPhone the first smartphone? /s

I disagree. PUBG was _insanely_ popular well before fortnite showed up.

Right. PUBG is still immensely popular with hundreds of thousands of steam players daily, and I believe it saw player growth in a recent month.

I'm sorry? PUBG sold 50 million copies. It is the 5th highest selling game in history. You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.

That's why I added "outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem". PUBG was incredibly big yes, but parents weren't asking questions about their children's addiction to PUBG and talk shows didn't have long segments about PUBG.

Fortnite became a place for people to hang out: https://twitter.com/anoopr/status/1071921080485457920

I think it's hard for gamers to really appreciate what Fortnite is. It's a whole new thing, that's never happened before. It's bigger than Pacman, Pokemon, Mario, Tetris, Angry Birds, etc.

My brother, a college football player, plays it. My sister, an Instagram addict and high schooler, plays it on her phone while shopping at, I dunno, Forever 21 I guess.

This is new, and worth paying attention to.

Minecraft. Pokemon Go. These things come and go. There is always some new fad.

This is the biggest, by an order of magnitude.

Compared to Fortnite, 50 million isn't that much.

copies not dollars

50 million copies, not $50 million. Assuming an average selling price of $30 and a 30% storefront cut, that’s about $1 billion in revenue.

Sorry you're right, but 50 million copies is not much either, when compared to Fortnite.

Maybe not compared to a free game like Fortnite, but 50 million copies is huge when it comes to video game sales. The 50 million number is from Xbox and PC only.

GTA V is the top grossing game of all time and sold 90 million copies on 3 platforms. Minecraft has sold 150 across way more platforms and has been around way longer.

That's my point, Fortnite is bigger than a "video game". It's a legitimate cultural phenomenon.

This isn't about video games anymore, it's about tapping into something bigger. Even Minecraft couldn't crack into the market segments Fortnite has.

Conversely, neither fortnite (nor any other game) has cracked the Minecraft market segment.

Fortnite is much bigger, both in terms of players and in terms of cultural impact, than Minecraft.

They're different pricing models. Fortnite is free to play and PUBG has an up-front cost. Copies sold/downloaded or peak active player-base is probably a more relevant comparison.

Why not just computer revenue directly?

>You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.

I see that minimaxir has been downvoted so it seems "mainstream" has different meanings.

I don't play video games and don't keep up with them. I've never heard of PUBG. But nevertheless, I did hear about Fortnite. Why? Because a business analyst on Youtube did a business case study[0] about Epic Games and the development history of Fortnite. That was unusual because he typically analyzes non-game companies[1] like Amazon, Uber, Stripe, GoPro, Theranos, etc.

My point is that there must have been a noticeable step change in popularity level between PUBG and Fortnite such that it entered his consciousness and justified a business case study from him -- which in turn entered my consciousness. If "mainstream" isn't the right word to use to describe Fortnite's greater reach to non-gamers, I don't know what a substitute word would be.

Also, I know what the "floss dance" is and that it's in Fortnite. If PUBG or other video games have named dances, I don't even know of their existence.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDlFLBEUqWk

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biz+doc

So your idea of mainstream is whatever videos you happen to run across?

Now, I do agree with you, but more to do with your point about the flossy dance, since seeing stuff from games leak into real life consistently is pretty mainstream.

You can even trace it back even earlier to Arma2 and DayZ (mod).

Besides PUBG, who else has done this in a successful way? Fortnite wasn’t the original but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point. I’m okay with “PUBG + Fortnite” ~= “almost single handedly”.

I think the key word in that quote is popularized — even if earlier games did it, these are the two to demonstrate widespread appeal.

Also worth pointing out that PUBG uses unreal, so Epic Games makes money off the royalties AND gets visibility into the PUBG sales data. It's very likely that seeing those numbers made Epic Games shift focus.

The PUBG sales numbers were visible to everyone in realtime: during the heyday of PUBG Steamspy was still accurate, and the game was only being sold on Steam. Any visibility Epic got from the licensing revenue would have been irrelevant.

The order in video games, as far as I can make it was:

Minecraft (hunger game mod) > DayZ/H1Z1 > PUBG > Fortnite

At each step, the genre grew by 1 or 2 orders or magnitude. So while Fortnite is by far the largest BR game now, if you look at the log-graph, they each had an almost equal impact on getting to where we are today and are an important part of the genre's history.

I am pretty sure there was an Arma mod that directly inspired pubg in there somewhere. Maybe even older then then hunger games mod.

Edit: Oh I just looked it up. The mod was PUBG. I just realized it was the same guy who made it. It was released as a mod for Arma in 2015 by a player who went by the handle "PlayerUnknown". So I guess it was after the minecraft mod.

Don’t forget super bomberman 2!

Plenty of games have had elimination modes for a long time. This is really just an evolution of that adding the mechanic of the map edges closing in.

Elimination mode is more generic. The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

>The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

Minecraft had nothing to do with it. PU was inspired by the Battle Royale novel/movie and The Running Man. He forked the Day Z ARMA2 mod and made DayZ: Battle Royale, and that predates H1Z1 KotH by 3 years.

Right, the problem is they didn't say PUBG + Fortnite. That's not single-handedly.

PUBG proved out the incredible appeal and potential of Battle Royale. Despite being a technical mess, it was a massive success and a game changer for the industry. It was the key catalyst and why Fortnite (and many others) added the mode.

This is not to take anything away from Fortnite though! They absolutely took it to the next level of awareness.

> but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point

That's really downplaying the success of PUBG though. It was the #1 most watched game on Twitch before Fortnite overtook it. Sure, Fortnite is more popular now, but PUBG was literally the most popular game at the reveleant time.

Is it even more odd that I can't figure why they did not reference the literal movie 'Battle Royale' that the concept was roughly based on?

I always saw it as inspired by the Hunger Games, which in turn captured the zeitgeist of the post-2001 and post-2008 society.

It's almost certainly the other way around since Battle Royale was published in 1999 and the Battle Royale film came out in 2000. Both probably take some inspiration from Lord of the Flies

But why did the genre blow up only now? I think that the mass culture projects massive amount of anxiety present in todays societies, and it is also visible in video games. I don't see how a bleak and dystopian game of dog-eat-dog, everyone on its own, 1 player wins and the 99 others lose, would be so popular in say 1995.

I think you're looking for a deep meaning that is not there. Video games are fun, period. The 12-yos that play Fortnite couldn't care less about dystopias.

There might be meaning in the timeline actually.

Internet was hardly available in the year 2000. It takes a lot of bandwidth (and probably CPU too) to run a 100 players FPS. It wouldn't do well before broadband got ubiquitous, almost a decade later.

> But why did it blow up only now

That doesn’t change the fact that BR predates the hunger games (though the author claims to not have heard about BR when she wrote the hunger games).

BR is supposedly about how the old of japan are metaphorically sacrificing the youth. The hunger games was (according to an interview) about reality tv meets the war in Iraq.

Battle Royale is not a game. They are talking about the game category. Battle Royale wasn't even a huge film, more a cult film.

I don't think you're appreciating the penetration that Fortnite has. PUBG may have come first, but Fortnite has 10x the players.

Not sure what Lord of the Flies has to do with battle royale...

Now finish UT4!

UT4 got killed by the success of Fortnite :(

"Valve", not "Value"!!

What does HN people think on the whole idea of stealing concept from PUBG? I am kind of divided on this topic.

The fast follower beating the original by offering a lower price is a well established business trend. Usually works pretty well. I just don't understand why PUBG isn't free yet.

PUBG doesn't have the scope for skins in the same way that Fortnite does. Fortnite's art style lends itself way better to crazy skins. It's also played more by a younger generation who are more likely to buy digital accessories (that's just IMO tho)

Because it's free, that's why it's played more by kids. Until you remove that huge distinction from the equation it's hard to claim anything else had as much of a factor. IMO if PUBG was free when Fortnite came out Fortnite would not have the marketshare it has today. Things like crazy skins is just a matter of willingness rather than anything intrinsic to the game.

What about Mario clones? (platformers)

Doom clones? (first person shooters)

Warcraft clones? (real time strategy)

...

I agree with your point but a funny thing about this list is that I can think of earlier games in the genre for both FPS and RTS off the top of my head. Dune 2 is the earliest RTS that I'm aware of and Wolfenstein is probably the earliest example of an FPS. I'd say this probably strengthens your point rather than weakening it.

Herzog Zwei was the influence for Dune 2, and Catacomb 3D was the precursor to Wolfenstein (both by id Software), so we can go even further in history if we like. Just goes to show there are large influences all over.

It’s interesting becuase I saw PUBG as an adaptation of Sa-Matras excellent Arma 3 wasteland mod which included all of the elements seen in fortnite/pubg like: scavenging firearms, building and free-for-all/teamwork choice through the Blufor/Opfor/Independent team selection.

https://wasteland.arma.su

The lead designer on PUBG, Brendan Greene, had previously made a Battle Royale Arma 2 mod.

I think Brendan’s mod came out ~2015 and Sa-Matras came out around 2013 which, itself is an adaptation of another mod. Please correct me if I am wrong. Not to say any of this is really new or original. As I recall there is an Arma 2 wasteland mod that came out before Arma 3: https://forums.bohemia.net/forums/topic/134450-arma2ru-waste...

Brendan's original mod was a fork of DayZ for Arma2 and came out roughly the same time as the Arma2 wasteland mod.

I don't really see it any different than stealing the concept of FPS from companies that came before, or from stealing the concept of video games from the original creators. I see no issue with it, much like I see no issue with all sorts of games borrowing from LOTR (or from other sources that eventually trace their way back to LOTR). Even PUBG stole the concept from others. It reminds me a lot of Hunger Games actual battles (not the teenage romance angst portions), and Hunger Games effectively stole the idea from elsewhere. (And likely I'm missing links in the chain of who stole what from who, and I don't even like the idea of calling it stealing.)

It's all literally the name of a film and novel, Battle Royale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(film)

Hunger Games is pretty clear about what its influences are: Ancient Rome and Reality TV. Some people will claim Collins stole the idea from Battle Royale, but it is more likely the two authors had the idea independently.

PUBG did it to themselves. The game just doesn't run well, so people are moving on to better versions of the battle royale experience (Fortnite, Black Ops 4, etc).

What was it that was stole from PUBG?

I'd argue it's a similar case as when businesses create competing product offerings with better execution and end up winning in the long term.

Staying on the gaming topic, you could say Call of Duty is a copy of Counter Strike? I'm not sure which came first but the idea still stands.

Not Country Strike, but yes, it was clearly inspired by Medal of Honor. Which was itself inspired by GoldenEye 007 and the movie Saving Private Ryan.

Was PUBG the first? Didn't they arguably steal the idea from a movie? And isn't the concept of last man standing like as old as dirt? Not exactly the same but I played assassin in the early 80s and it wasn't a new concept then.

Arguably I feel like the idea is too simple to deserve any kind of protection. It would be like protecting "hide and seek" or "tag"

Concepts can't be stolen. The gameplay is so significantly different, it's hard to say what we're arguing what's stolen that PUBG didn't "steal" themselves.

PUBG makes a lot of money still so no harm done. And the game concept is kind of different. I don’t enjoy Fortnite but spent many hours on PUBG. I’d say let them steal, that’s how new genres are born.

Good artists borrow...

... great artists steal.

I didn't even blink, there's tons of precedent everywhere for copying the concept and doing it better than the first person. Minecraft wasn't the first to do what it did (commonly Infiniminer gets that credit), neither was Unreal Tournament (Quake), neither was Starcraft (commonly Dune 2 gets the credit, but also Age of Empires came out, did well, but didn't become more or less an official South Korean sport), nor World of Warcraft (Ultima Online and lots of others).

Honestly, possibly because of my Silicon Valley biases, I tend to think that the idea isn't sacred, it's that the execution on the idea is what turns a good idea into a successful one, and Epic executed way better despite PUBG's initial momentum. They threw it away with performance problems, bugs, cheaters, etc. and Fortnite capitalized.

I tend to agree but at the same time it’s hard to square that with the theory of IP (vs it’s implementation where the game mechanics can’t be patented), which says that nobody will be incentivized to develop new things if there is no state protection against copying.

I agree that the line is blurry, but I think there's a workable line.

1. You are still given a monopoly over selling your game, and someone else can't just make the same game using your assets, so at least you get to make money from your work via copyright.

2. It's a game, so I would argue that it's not worth as much to society to let you monopolize selling of a game mechanic as opposed to, say, a mechanical design. (I'm fully aware of patent controversies, but we're talking about games so I'm staying at broad strokes.)

3. I think there's an argument to be made that games are more like art than machines, and thus they count enough as speech that over-protecting IP rights in games would have a chilling effect.

Just some thoughts.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think it was PUBG that came up with the battle royal concept. I believe H1Z1 had battle royal mode before PUBG existed.

A Minecraft mod seems to get credit for being the first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game

Quake 3 Arena had a last-man-standing mod. I don't recall the shrinking arena aspect, though.

H1Z1's BR mod was a copy of the fork of the Arma 2 DayZ mod... which was done by the creator of PUBG.

PUBG was not nearly the first survival shooter. I still remember Hunger Games style maps in Minecraft back in 2010 and those were derivative of older survival mods from ARMA.

Nothing is completely novel, or original. Everything made today is built on our collective experience up to the moment we release it. Its why you can't patent a concept like "battle royale" or "arena shooter" or "survival game" the same way the first successful action movie couldn't patent action movies.

This is free market at it's best - a company taking a concept, building a better product and offering it to the customers. It's like Sony building a better portable cassette player, Samsung building a better TV, Apple offering better headphones and Valve Software building a better first person shooter.

Trying to block or interfere with this, like IP laws tend to do these days, will cause stagnation and break the main reason why free market has proven to be the most people-serving economic system.

Is it stealing? Should there only be one battle royale game? Should there only be one racing game? Should there only be one FPS game?

I don't think it's a problem at all except for the small issue that PUBG is an Unreal Engine game and there's a possibility that Epic's inside information about PUBG benefited their development of Fortnite. It's all just speculation (and a settled lawsuit?) but it's an awkward piece of the genre's history.

The idea of intellectual property is now so deeply ingrained in the average person's consciousness that a mere "concept" can be "stolen" now.

Epic had this working long before PUBG ever existed.

You can start a death match in Unreal Tournament 2004 and check some settings to make it a sort of battle royale.

All gaming companies could have made huge profits. Most game companies opted to be condescending and preach personal politics into peoples hobbies. It's not about fun but it's about education.

Instead of working on a game for few years and releasing something innovative they want to release new but really 1.2 version every year with 20 dlcs in between. We Map editor - nope

Lan gameplay - nope

In a way counter strike is better

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