Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

The thing with fortnite is that it was free, available and nearly first. It's success is a direct relation to the apex of those things together.

It's success will not be emulated even if better games (Like; Apex Legends from Respawn/EA) come to the fore.

It's unwise to use their model because, like world of warcraft, it only really works once or for one incumbent.

Fortnite works because "it's fortnite", it's already successful as hell, any monetisation, even small amounts is enough to catapult it to profitability.

Time will see if I'm right or not, the industry is changing, large studios need more money if they're to continue making AAA games and it's clear that people begrudge spending $60 for a game and then having monetisation inside. I hope EA's gamble with Apex works, not to prove me wrong but because I think it's a good game.

Fortnite on the other hand.. I just don't get, the combat/controls/graphics/hitboxes/animations are kinda dirt. But I think it's popular because it's popular, like Paris Hilton.

> he combat/controls/graphics/hitboxes/animations are kinda dirt

This is just wrong. The game became popular because its a pretty damn good game and quite fun. Yes, it is somewhat derivative but most things are. People forget that Epic is an old school titan of the gaming industry that pioneered a lot of what we see in FPS titles today. They know what they're doing, even if they lifted some inspiration from other titles.

> it is somewhat derivative

I'd argue it's a lot more than somewhat derivative.

The game mechanics are a direct rip-off of Player Unknown Battlegrounds, except more 'kid friendly.' The only notable differences are being cartoonish and the addition of a building system (which looks a whole lot like the one in Rust). Here is a side-by-side video of gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KN6_Ibxnpk.

Their main source of income is selling in-game emotes like dances, which are all stolen without paying any royalty to their creators.

Which was a ripoff of h1z1, which was a ripoff of day z, which was a ripoff CoD zombies, which was a ripoff of battlefield, which was a ripoff of quake, which was a ripoff of doom, etc., etc.

Probably missing a bunch of steps but you get the picture.

The building system in Rust is a lot like H1Z1, but it is very different from Day-Z. Rust and H1Z1 differ in that Rust is not a zombie survival game, unlike the original (now discontinued) version of H1Z1. Coincidentally Fortnite was originally designed as a zombie survival game and shifted to battle royale late in development, much like H1Z1.

COD Zombies doesn't have building other than at specific points where you could reinforce barricades.

At the time the first COD Zombies game mode was released (Call of Duty: World at War) Battlefield did not yet have a barricading system (like it does now) or any sort of wave-based survival mode.

Quake is a deathmatch shooter, Battlefield is a tactical shooter. Very little resemblance.

Quake was made by the same people as Doom.

My point is that Fortnite copies very much from PUBG. I didn't make any arguments about whether that is acceptable or precedented.

I think this argument is silly tbh. Are we going to say no games can have a zombie mode or team deathmatch because games have done it before? Battle royale is basically free for all game mode but with a persistent death mechanic which has been around since the dawn of gaming - the idea that it can be ripped off rather than just iterated on doesn't hold for me

>My point is that Fortnite copies very much from PUBG. I didn't make any arguments about whether that is acceptable or precedented.

Please read what I said and don't put words in my mouth.

when everythings been done everything looks like a ripoff. the point is how it all comes together in their own setting.

I don't think Fortnite is a good example of Epic "knowing what they're doing". The game was stuck in development hell for many years during the closed betas and they really didn't seem to know how to fix the game (it took them 6 years to release the primary game mode as "early access", which it is still labelled as). It never really took off until a small part of the team spent less than 2 months on replicating PUBG's battle royale mode into the game as an experiment. That's not really "knowing what to do", that's more some kind of luck or serendipity.

Fornite isn't even remotely near first. They took good ideas from other games and executed them very well.

The one thing Fortnite did do better than everyone was getting mobile to work well. F2P, good mobile controls, and the community of streams is what made Fortnite take off.

Just a small comment that Cross-progress in Fortnite is great. Means you have the same account on your Android, Mac, PC and PS4.

They really nailed it.

Fortnite is a really well made game, I've never had any issues with the core gameplay/ game engine. Less consistent than CS:GO, but more consistent than siege (A game with a very very strong "competitive" contingent)

I don't feel Warcraft is a fair comparison at all because with an MMO you have significantly more invested in your character than anything in fortnite. We are talking thousands of hours of invested. Many players have hundreds of days played (meaning a full 24 hours per day).

That all resets about once a year when a new expansion gets out.

You invest into fortnight the same as you invest in anything, you specialize your skill for this one game, your social circle revolves around it etc. You don't need gear to invest in a game

WoW expansions don't come every year.

These days there's a soft reset every 5-6 months when a new raid tier comes out rather than only once per expansion. For the last few years they've tried hard to make it so that when someone who played years ago gets the urge to give it another try they can actually make it into the endgame content before that urge passes.

Gear does, true. But there is a lot more personal attachment to an account than gear. There are achievements, mounts, pets, guilds, social connections/friends, etc... Also during it's peak the reset was much less of a thing (Wrath was the first expansion that started the gear reset per tier trend and it was also the peak of the games player count).

Fortnite isn't near/first of anything except the mix of existing motifs they mixed together and executed on exceedingly well. It's not a novel format like the first sandbox or rpg or fps or anything

Of it's generation, fortnite was the first to really nail the aesthetics and "How do you do, fellow kids"-elements. The gameplay is almost secondary.

PUBG is almost intimidating, fortnite is the opposite.

Isn't Fortnite just the next evolution of Team Fortress 2? I think it's far more likely something replaces it than Fortnite is the king of free to play online battle games indefinitely.

I'd say Overwatch is a closer analogue to being the next evolution of TF2 than Fortnite is, from a purely gameplay perspective (the two games have very similar game modes from point control/king of the hill to "Cart pushing" along with the class/hero/trait based characters).

I think the commentor meant in regards to both being the largest F2P shooters in their day. I disagree with that though because I see Fortnite capturing the more of the COD semi-casual crowd rather than the relatively more hardcore crowd TF2 captured.

Of course this is really generalized, but I can't imagine Drake playing TF2 back in its heyday.

I think the commentor meant in regards to both being the largest F2P shooters in their day.

That's fair, and if that's the case, I'd still say Overwatch has a better claim to that title (beyond the initial purchase price, anyway-but Blizzard routinely opens the game up for extended F2P periods).

What's going to be interesting to watch in the purely F2P arena is this newcomer Apex from EA. I tried it out last night and it has a lot of interesting features and motifs that seem to be a collection of all of these games; you've got the dedicated classes from TF2, the "hero" theme from overwatch and the overarching battle royale/last team standing from Fortnite, PUBG and others.

Fortnite definitely getting there, but competitive Overwatch is reaching StarCraft levels of intense (or what competitive StarCraft was in the 2000's), there was a team from Europe I think that won over a million dollars in an Overwatch pro match back in 2017, teams are getting sponsored[1], even ESPN-"the worldwide leader in sports"-is getting into broadcasting Overwatch matches[2].

None of this is to take anything away from what the team over at Epic is doing or to say anything less of Fortnite, for what it's worth. It's definitely a phenomenon in its own right, but there's serious amounts of money being moved around for competitive OW gaming.

---

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2019/02/08/overw...

[2]http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/24062274/overwatch-le...

It seems to me like

TF2 -> Overwatch -> Apex Legends

I think having 100 players play one actual realtime game well is unprecendented technical achievement and Fortnight in relation to it is similar for me as iPhone is in relation to actually working capacitive touch screen.

In the world of games, being free (legally or otherwise) is pretty much requirement of exorbitant organic popularity.

The original Starseige:TRIBES let you play with up to 128 players. It was okay on dialup but my 10down/1up cable connection gave me consistent pings under 30. That was in 1999.

Ahead of it's time I guess... Internet and gaming weren't enough of a thing back then for anything exorbitant.

It must have done well because I heard of it despite never playing it.

Indeed. Thinking about Battlefield 1942, there were servers with 128 players, lots of vehicles and it ran perfectly fine.

Guess most people just did not experience games like these the way we both did.

Yup, that or my personal favorite Subspace where you had a couple hundred players on 56k and everything was pretty snappy.

Subspace:Continuum ate up SO much of my time in middle school, I think it was my first experience with online gaming. Great times.

You can still download it to this day: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=14491...

Fortnite wasn't the first 100+ player battle royale game by a long shot, so it's not unprecedented. I love Epic Games but they definitely jacked the entire concept from PUBG and others.

The only reason I like fornite is the building + fighting. It instantly made the game click in a way no game has since quake 2.

Too bad Starforge was abandoned. The multiplayer gameplay promised to be quite revolutionary but they never cleaned things up. You can build and you have to protect your base while others gather building supplies, and launch offensive strikes on the enemy's base. Honestly a really cool idea and more engaging and deep than a battle royale.

Did you play Action Quake 2? That's probably my favorite online FPS experience along with Quake I Team Fortress.

And PUBG jacked the idea from DayZ

Well... I think that way of putting it is a little too simplistic.

> PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) [...] is based on previous mods that were created by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games, inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative direction.

> [...]

> Lead designer Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayerUnknown's_Battlegrounds

Lol no... it was based on an earlier mod by the same developer.

I think a lot of people seem to gloss over how much of an effect being free had on capturing far more market share than any paid title did before it. It doesn’t matter if fortnite was or wasn’t the first 100+ player battle royals game.

Gamers like to discuss the mechanics and gameplay and who copied who but all of this misses the major point- it was F2P first and foremost, in a category where there aren’t many if any free games, (+ was well executed, + multi-platform). But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.

If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)

I 100% agree that F2P was the key ingredient in this case and that's why Epic Games made the right call while PUBG Corporation is struggling to control bleed-out from almost two years of failed promises to fix some fundamental issues and bugs.

Instead, PUBG Corporation doubled down on extracting revenue and added lootboxes, a similarly broken mobile PUBG (yeah let's totally rewrite the game in another engine before we bother to fix the one we've got) and in-game cosmetic purchases.

This angered people twice as hard, because A) the sentiment surrounding in-game monetization with paid games and B) the fact that a free game had less buggy game logic and mechanics, while constantly adding new features and refining gameplay as it settles into its market.

> But the F2P, that’s the real unprecedented aspect IMO.

Not unprecedented. There were already F2P battle royales, they were just shitty and not marketed well.

> If the App Store market has taught us anything about today’s game market, it’s that F2P titles (esp quality ones) will outperform paid upfront apps in sheer volume by multiple magnitudes (100-1000x if not more)

Ok, that's just not true. I mostly play paid games on mobile. F2P worked for Epic Games because the Battle Royale genre was exploding and they provided the path of least resistance to becoming part of the scene, but after things have died down people will end up gravitating to more niche expansions on the genre which refine the gameplay in ways they prefer. Don't take this one data point and form an entire conclusion. That's bad business.

> Ok, that’s just not true. I...

> Don’t take this one data point

A little irony there ;)

I’d like to see some evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you mostly play premium titles, but I wasn’t making a claim that people like you don’t exist. The fact of the matter remains that F2P quality titles outperform in download numbers, and the majority of top apps in the App Store support this claim.

My apologies, I shouldn't have so starkly segued from that point into my own anecdata. I didn't mean to offer it as a valid datapoint but just as a subjective experience, which is useful in the sense that compiling a large repository of subjective experiences can reveal the general societal consensus around a topic.

I also misread your post a bit, and didn't fully understand the point you were trying to make. I agree that volume-wise, F2P outperforms but that's a given. I don't think that won't ever be true if we only look at the mass market as a whole. But once we start examining niche categories such as the competitive scene, I think this assumption becomes less accurate.

Adding some extra data points in addition to covercash's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAG_(video_game) (2010, Playstation 3)

> MAG used a new server architecture[8] to support online battles with up to 256 players

H1Z1 could, I believe, support 200-250 characters. PUBG superseded it with 100 players, then came Fornite. Arma 3 (2013), which housed the predecessor mod to PUBG, has a max player count of 255 IIRC.

In short, while it's important to have lots of players, I suspect it's not a large part of why Fortnite was successful.

Battlefield did it before with higher tick rate + physics / vehicles.

Just to add to the others, JOTR[1] had 150 player servers in 2004, with highly concentrated fighting areas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Risi...

I played the shit out of that demo for months.

If you think putting 100 players in the same realtime game is an "unprecedented technical achievement" you simply have no idea of what you're talking about.

Factorio was able to put 400 people into one game, where the server was a Youtube streamer's home computer, a full year before Fortnite Battle Royale came out.

> I think having 100 players play one actual realtime game well is unprecendented technical achievement

It's really not; Delta Force: Land Warrior was doing 50 player multiplayer in 2000 and a number of games were doing 100+ within a couple years after that, and a few even before.

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