The Man Behind “Fortnite”
wsj.com
wsj.com
Then somehow out of the blue - Fortnite became huge: they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play, and compared to the competition, the game ran smoothly on almost any PC using it. This coupled with its young cartoony look like League of Legends and riding the Battle Royale hype without the realism, helped surely fuel it.
Let's not forget that Tim - the man behind Fortnite - is also the man behind Unreal, Unreal Tournament (huge RIP Unreal Tournament and its fanbase - that's another story not many would wanna know about now ), Paragon (another RIP and an angry fanbase) and the Unreal engine, which is Epic Game's biggest asset after Fortnite ( actually I have no data to compare what makes Epic Games more money, Unreal Engine or Fortnite at this time)
P.S. If you're into this stuff also look up Cliff Bleszinski / Cliffy B: he's another big name from the Unreal scene but retired from Epic Games when Tencent bought a huge stake and "peaced out' from the scene after his career flopped when he tried to do solo projects.
Cliffy B was an early investor in Oculus. He put a lot of money into Lawbreakers which flopped.
Let's be honest here, it's more accurate to say they saw the massive popularity of PubG, copied the gameplay mode, and made it free in a transparent attempt to boost a failing game and get in front of the PubG juggernaut. The initial version of Fortnite BR wasn't that great, it was just free.
Where the Fortnite team really did a good job was taking that initial BR version and turning it into something with huge global appeal and continuing fresh content to keep players engaged for multiple years.
but let's not forget the emotes/dances. Those went viral!
Edit: I like that I'm getting downvoted by fanboys of epic for pointing out the large human cost to games being "updated as fast as gamers want it". https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-cru... if you don't know but games are very complex simulations and very hard to work on. Keeping fortnite up to date took a ton of effort by a ton of people in a not really sustainable way for peoples lives or careers to make it a success. Also can take irreversible impacts on help and psyche.
And really every time I played that game it was still massively buggy. For instance build to weapon switch issue that locked me out of controls for 1-3 seconds on a regular basis.
And epic got very good at the cheating stuff because they were helping blue hole solve the same issues and got to prototype it out on pubg and got a headstart there. Yeah that's a risk of using a team's engine but...
My suspicion is you're being downvoted because your comment comes across as bitter and irrelevant.
Making people work longer hours does not.
You easily get the situation where creators know better than the makers.
These are hard problems to solve on the server side, and require resources, so it was easier not to worry about it at all, and at most do post-game analysis occasionally to try to retroactively detect the impossible (with a very low detection rate, so much so that they rely upon user reports).
This is one of the selling points of something like Stadia (which has to be balanced with the downside of latency) -- by default a cloud renderer would give minimal information to the client.
But also, that's PUBG-the-company, not PUBG-the-game. The distinction is that the PUBG mobile version (with tens of millions of daily actives) is by Tencent, and PUBG-the-company gets some kind of licensing revenue from it.
PUBG was supposedly the "better" h1z1 but even ninja (the famous ninja that played with drake, former halo player etc.) went back to h1z1 solely because pubg was so garbo
then fortnites BR came onto the scene and the rest is history
Compare Wolfenstein 3D to Doom, except pretend Wolfenstein never had the "Nazis" idea and you were just fighting generic soldiers.
Unreal is a hyper hyper smart games company. They built the frameworks that companies built games on. I think it's really awesome to see them win in the end like this after decades in the sticks.
Did epic pay the celebrities that used it initially.
What's interesting is that fortnite underwent almost exactly the same journey as H1Z1. Start as a paid PvE, release free BR, cancel survival and focus on BR.
I emailed Mark Rein in high school about getting into 3D programming. He was the president of Epic Games back then and emailed me back.
I stopped playing when I went to college. What happened to the UT fan base? Is there an article about it? Genuinely curious.
People should pay more attention to Tim Sweeney. He appears to have a much better grasp on how to run a tech company using an open platform than the more well known Silicon Valley CEOs. The Unreal Engine may not be explicitly open source as in Linux, but it’s all viewable and the licensing terms are reasonable.
That “somehow” is pretty obvious: they had already built all the assets for a great multiplayer FPS-esque, and already had a whole marketing department spun up to get people to play it. Once they decided to pivot to Battle Royale as a game mechanic, they spent a month on rewriting game logic, and then had a nearly-finished AAA Battle Royale game on their hands with a staff ready to sell it, with more polish than existing entries in the genre and no other studios close to catching up to chase the fad in time.
Business take-away: if you build for a well-established, very competitive market, and then—near the finish line—pivot into a new and (as yet) less-competitive market where you can still reuse everything you built, the extra polish you had to put into your product to get it to stand out in the heavily-competitive field, will make you stand head-and-shoulders above everyone else in the less-competitive field.
(I’m trying to think of other good examples of this effect in the business domain but coming up short. Anyone?)
Netflix might also be a good example shifting from DVD renting to streaming.
a better comparison would be how DOTA spawned from Warcratft 3, or how Hearthstone spawned from WOW.
a failed comparison would be how valve released Artifact off of DoTA2. but DOTA auto chess is now a thing. that may take off.
Overwatch came from the assets in development for the cancelled Project Titan MMO.
DoTA was built in War3's map editor. Hearthstone used the IP from the Warcraft franchise. Artifact used the IP from Dota 2. Dota Auto Chess was built in Dota 2's map editor.
DotA spawned from Starcraft custom map Aeon of Strife using new mechanics from WC3, DotA:Allstars/DOTA 2 is a heavy revamp of the original map. Between WoW and Hearthstone there was WoW TCG, not a video game.
Probably the most famous example is a company called Burbn. Here's a story (not mine) about that pivot:
Posting anon.
In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.
To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.
Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.
As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.
That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.
They were working on a vector drawing software, targeted at making rich web2.0 type illustrations more easily. For an example, check out the screenshot of the early app for an idea of the kind of output they were showing off in 2012: https://www.macgasm.net/2012/08/16/sketch-2-1-update-adds-re...
They were competing with Adobe Illustrator at this time, which was extremely dense and less focused on that one thing.
And then skeumorphism fell away and product design workflows started evolving and absorbing the systematization practices from devops, etc, and designers needed a way to make mockups that was more advanced than hypersimplistic tools like balsamiq, but less dense/more focused than Illustrator. In 2019, their value prop is completely different (and better!), but the bones of that first application are very visible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EatUkHez0U
Since sketch's customers were making this journey, they software emerged along with it, and they deservedly dominated the early product design workflow. Now Adobe's competing with them instead of the other way around, but new entrants like Figma are building in features that are easier from a fresh start, like web collab and canvas items as react elements. Long term, they might get PUBG'd, to use a fortnight analogy – pioneering the category but getting usurped by bigger hits (fortnight) down the line.
- Fortnite is not a shooting game. This is the main trap of the game. It looks like shooter, feels like a shooter, can be played like a shooter, but is not a shooter. Fortnite is a fighting game and should be played like one. It has an incredibly heavy reliance on mechanical skills (ala fighting games) and failure to recognize this will just lead to disappointment with the game.
- Fortnite's success was a complete accident. The BR mode was a spun off "weekend project" for fun in order to attract players into buying Save The World. It was free and meant really just as an advertising tool. There wasn't much thought put into how it was supposed to play, but Epic 100% did not see where this was going, nor did the community at the time. And that was very much instrumental to it's success. Had Epic saw this coming, they would have totally destroyed the mechanics that made it so good right off the rip. I could write an essay about this, but the short of it is that the building mechanics were used in a totally unintended/unforeseen way and it lead to a wild success. Mark my words, one day in the future, free of NDA's, former devs will come out with some truly wild stories about FNBR.
- Fortnite became a runaway success with kids because they have the easiest time adapting to completely new game mechanics. It gets a little gritty here, but the short of it is that Fornite is a completely new type of game with a completely new type of play style. Older players were trying to shove a square piece through a seemingly square hole (see note 1 about shooter/fighter), while younger players could easily adapt their blank gaming slates to fortnite's play style. Yeah the cosmetics and stuff helped, but nobody likes playing a game they suck at.
TL;DR: Fortnite is deceiving in what it is. Fortnite was a total accidental success, because of accidentally awesome mechanics. Kids love fortnite because they were less prone to that earlier mentioned deception, and can pick up new things much quicker than older gamers.
Which delights him immensely how badly I suck :).
So to monetize on that popularity the creator of the game released "Worms 2 Armageddon", with a rope game. The problem was, they didn't get it at all. The official rope game had none of the elements of the hacked one, and was a complete flop. But oddly enough, Worms 2 (the original) was still being played almost a decade later.
Similarly, combos in fighting games were originally a bug. In the original Street Fighter 2, you could attack someone two or three times before they could block or counterattack (I believe the initial term was called a 2 in 1). Capcom liked what it did to the game, and consequently kept it in.
Watch one of the Fortnite world cup matches going on right now [1] and tell me that you're watching a pubg rip :)
Maybe I wouldn’t call them Quake rips though; However, all the Unreals certainly weren’t innovative in any meaningful way, gameplay wise.
The engine business exploded for Epic around Unreal Engine 3, I believe. Before that: they really wanted to sell those games. See the career of aforementioned CliffyB – he wasn’t Epic’s John Carmack, he was their John Romero.
As for Id Software, they did licensed their technology since early days (Half-Life, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, few others), but indeed Unreal surpassed them with tooling and support.
Id tried to recover their position, around Doom 3 they renamed their „Quake engine” to Id Tech, and was working on the user-friendliness of it’s offering. I think they abandoned that idea by themselves, nonetheless, soon after they were bought by ZeniMax and that was it: no more licenses for companies not related to Bethesda. They don’t even bother to allow their current games to be modded.
Meanwhile Epic’s engine business was flourishing, yet the games were flopping. Notice that only after Fortnite’s success they decided to open their Steam rival.
Had they done those the other way around, it probably wouldn't have worked- Fortnite is what sent Epic Games from the technosphere to Wal-Mart in terms of societal recognition.
No meaningful way, gameplay wise? UT had way more game modes than Quake3 did... two-team TF2-style objective with attackers and defenders, that football mode, betrayal mode, four-team domination, or the various vehicle modes... I had a lot of fun in those modes which they seemed to enjoy experimenting in
Related (to both Fortnite and Gears of War): some words from Rod Fergusson https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/14/18679549/fortnite-save-the...
I downloaded Fortnite certain it was a hack and a ripoff but it was literally the only Battle Royale-style game available to me at the time. Being free and on all platforms out of the gate was crucial.
I think what really lead to Fortnite's ultra success was how well optimized the game was, that they even were able to put it on mobile and every low end computer out there.
Engineers as a breed usually run to mgmt/blame mgmt when they can't get their brethren to do things. So when an engineer shows up, who can get other engineers to follow, then that's one special unicorn you take care off, protect and support.
In many modern tech companies they'd instead be a (pretty powerful) VP of something and let someone else be the C*O to deal with the people/managerial aspects of the company.
My step-son often jumps on to talk to the friends he has at school or where his father lives, often he just finds a corner of a room and hunkers down he's not actively playing (though he does of course do that as well).
In a strange way epic has made a compelling second life by focusing on the game playing aspect first.
With the creation tools they have, it'd be interesting to see what would happen if players could make their own maps that where shareable so others could visit.
You can also do it in the normal BR mode. It takes a few minutes until the circle starts shrinking and it shrinks in multiple phases, so you have 5-10min (more if you're lucky) to just mess around before it gets too small.
This already exists, called creative mode. My son and his friends play this all the time - they even planned a sleepover party for 10 kids around it.
Everyone was always online. Ya, we liked the game, some even cared about their rank, but the beauty was playing with all your friends and talking over Skype. I'm glad that kids have the opportunity to be social in a time where technology often makes us lonelier
With the rise of quick match and match making, it felt like that was dying, and communities are instead pulling into Twitch and Discord instead. Some of my closest online friends were made in online games, so it's good that newer games still allow for that.
When Fortnite BR came out it had much better stability/performance, kid-friendly graphics, but ALSO a really unique, and twitch friendly fighting mechanic with building. Watching good players in a build battle is way more interesting than long range sniping or bad vehicle physics.
I'm glad they clarified that, I wasn't sure which was which for a moment.
If all there is to do is to get achievements and better loot, then players will tire and leave.
If there's community, ways to express identity, and so forth, then players will keep each other engaged.
Fortnite doubles down on the latter by having an in-game store with time-windowed products and other mechanics that heavily leverage FOMO and social anxiety.
What games are you thinking about where this applies?
Many of the most popular games with which I'm familiar (Overwatch, PUBG, Starcraft II, DotA, League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, etc.) seem to have very high skill ceilings. That is, high-level competitive players in those games are way better than the average gamer.
I think a big way these games bring in players/stay current is by having a very active esports scene -- which only really works when you have "pro" quality players.
With the exception of time-gated achievement games (most MMOs, for example), the trend I see is a low barrier-to-entry but a very high skill ceiling.
One tactic that seems pretty common is to get people in-game quickly (f2p), teach them the core gameplay mechanics, then make it a very time-consuming grind to achieve the highest levels of play.
Consider that in Fortnite a junior player can outlive and outlast a seasoned player by avoiding conflict, and score reasonably well.
In Pokemon Go and other similar mass market games, skill is an after thought at best; it's all about the balance between engagement with your friends and community and grinding levels and awards; intrinsic versus extrinsic.
The prolonged death of arena shooters is the evidence of the importance of skill.
Most games will put players of similar skill level against each other, so the fact that there's a cohort of players who are much stronger than you can be totally invisible to your experience of the game as a weaker player, even when that delta is getting larger over time. Whatever skill level you happen to be at, there's probably someone else there too.
Once you've seen everything the game has to offer, it starts getting boring quickly. Like watching the same movie over and over. Some you can watch over and over because they're that good, some you watch once or twice and you're done.
Now to your question of it being too hard to beat good players in an older game, that does have an effect. You might find it difficult to get into Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 these days because the people still playing are really, really good. They've been playing the same game for a decade.
Not disagreeing with you, just adding on.
This is then considered the "meta", most efficient tactic available, and in some communities, it will be heavily frowned upon to deviate from the established meta as that's seen as "throwing the match".
That's why a lot of multiplayer games are really fun right after release: Most players are new with no clue what they are doing, everybody is enjoying themselves even if they are messing up, they are still having fun exploring how everything works.
But as communities mature, and more people understand the mechanics at play and how best to exploit them to their gain, the community becomes more "mature" and competitive. Which is completely at odds with "messing around for fun", a process most new players learn by.
Playing an unpopular indie game (or even a game that's >8 years old) is kinda lonely. Yeah its fun but who am I going to talk to it about? Playing Fortnite or Overwatch or even a new AAA single-player game feels like being in the cultural zeitgeist.
There's also a glut of indie games like Into the Breach,Celeste, Dead Cells - if that's more you're thing!
There are oodles of great single player games being released still, and the enteryainemtn value of them is massive - games like Red Dead Redemption have o er 40 hours of content just in the main storyline alone!
IMHO there have been 9 key factors to Fortnite's success:
1. They didn't go for a "military" motif (think Call of Duty, PUBG, etc). Instead they chose whimsy, basically. This gives almost limitless possibilities for skins and in-game themes. Instead of just changing the colour of weapons and combat fatigues, you can be a banana (the article mentions this), John Wick, Marshmello, a chicken (the Tender Defender, which is just an amazing name) and so on. This provides an endless supply of skins people can buy. They also (wisely) chose to have limited customization slots (from memory, glider, trails, skin, back bling, harvester and weapons rather than, say, left boot, right boot, left leg, right leg, etc).
2. Further to (1), this means pretty much anything can be put in the game and it "fits". Earlier this year, Sea of Thieves kind of blew up on Twitch for a couple of months. Next Fortnite season there were pirates, a pirate ship, cannons you could shoot yourself across the map with, etc. Coincidence? I think not.
3. There is only one map. I saw PUBG added new maps. Huge mistake. HUGE. This just splits the player base. It meant (in PUBG at least) people would back out if they didn't get on the map they wanted. The alternative of selecting map still splits the player base. Instead, Fortnite has one map that constantly changes.
4. Another way to keep things fresh: LTMs. The Floor is Lava is a relatively recent example of this.
5. The first FPSs had static maps. Think CSGO or Rainbow 6 as recent(ish) examples. This leads to players who know the map camping a spot where they can kill you with a pixel shot to the big toe when you walk by. Then came destructible environments, which seem like a good idea, but they quickly devolve into static maps as the environment is destroyed. Fortnite has both destructible elements and the ability to build. The parallels to Minecraft are apt. This was a real innovation in a shooter.
6. It being free-to-play with purchases being purely cosmetic so it's not a pay-to-win game ("pay-to-flex" is probably a good way to describe what Fortnite is).
7. You can't just log on and buy "everything". There are challenges. Items are available only for a limited time. Certain items are thus rare (eg the original Skull Trooper). It really encourages constant play.
8. The creator code program so people (ie streamers) would push the item shop.
9. It's a game that's entertaining to watch and isn't too short. Personally I've watched a lot on Twitch and I don't even play the game. How nuts is that?
Something will eventually come along to replace Fortnite. I'm not sure this will happen anytime soon. I also suspect you won't see something that so singularly occupies mindshare like Fortnite so a long time to come.
I wonder how well it would have done without YouTube or Twitch.
So you have people who truly loved one setting stick to it till nobody plays any more, but they are then not part of the general population and particularly any new IAP (although recent developments seem like they are trying to fix that).
Well, maybe a huge mistake from a business, milk-the-cow-dry standpoint. But from a gameplay perspective, there's a fair number of players who enjoy playing on multiple maps and wouldn't keep playing a game with a single map.
A case in point being myself and my close group of friends, who still play many hours of PUBG every week and also buy the season passes. We don't play Fortnite or Apex Legends, which only have one map (among many other differences).
There's plenty of room for more than one way of managing a large multiplayer game, thankfully. I'd dread a future where game-makers only try to optimize for financial success and are afraid of ailenating _any_ part of their customer base. Thankfully, there seems to be a point where things shift back out of equilibrium when too many game companies try to do this. Fortnite actually being a very good example.
It's also one of the few FPS games I've encountered where, for several years, I felt like I could play it almost indefinitely (that is, in what little free time I had). It directly drove at least two major system upgrades. Everything's different now, of course, but if they came out with another single player campaign in that universe I would pick it up without a second thought.
Has outline.com been handcuffed? Whenever I hit a paywall it used to just be a matter of feeding them the link. Now everything seems to get: "We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by Outline"
EDIT: Removed possible demeaning sentence
And whops. There we go. Good old Tim stopped wanking to Day-Z and got some shit done, all on his own.
Not to mention that Epic Games is pile of crap now that they released this game. It was once a nice company to work work for, now its just the same shitty sweat shop like any other gaming company, who only sees bottom lines and milking customers... And employees.