In the world of games, being free (legally or otherwise) is pretty much requirement of exorbitant organic popularity.
It must have done well because I heard of it despite never playing it.
Guess most people just did not experience games like these the way we both did.
You can still download it to this day: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=14491...
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 PUBG superseded it with 100 players, then came Fornite.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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Risi...
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.