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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

> they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play

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.

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Let's be more honest - their success was largely due to the PUBG developers refusing to fix a broken game and tackle cheating.

I'm going to bet on technical debt and raw lack of experience rather than "refusal."

A true difference in knowing how to use the tool. Obviously, the creators of the engine are going to put out a more optimized game than pretty much anyone else using it.

Don't forget having the team work 90 hour weeks for multiple years to power the success.

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...

> I like that I'm getting downvoted by fanboys of epic

My suspicion is you're being downvoted because your comment comes across as bitter and irrelevant.

They could've hired more people and got the same work cranked out in similar time, long hours != popular. Plenty of companies have cracked the whip, but it doesn't always lead to success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Hiring more people increases costs if everyone is on salary.

Making people work longer hours does not.

Sure, this is true. If it is one person. These games are huge, with multiple teams. So this is clearly not true. No one person knows one part of the game.

You easily get the situation where creators know better than the makers.

How is raw lack of experience different from lack of experience? Greater risk of food poisoning?

"Greater risk of codebase poisoning" is actually an interesting way to put it.

It helps that epic had 800 employees to start churning out updates after it got traction. None of the previous BR games had studios working at that scale.

Yeah, but after making millions, instead of investing heavily in a crack team to shape things up, they just tackled mobile instead, completely rebuilding the game in another engine, and adding lootboxes, etc. all while slowly driving away their core fanbase.

Why did PUBG drop the ball? Do they regret that decision?

They got it to the market quickly and made a couple of billion. While we can hindsight now about some very poor choices they made -- choices that opened them up to rampant cheating with little ability to block it -- they made bank and have already had a success curve that has gone far longer than most games do, regardless of how perfectly they were executed.

What kind of bad choices are you talking about here? Was it things such as the engine giving too much information to the clients?

That and trusting client information with extraordinarily few server-side validation such as, for instance, impossible shots, impossible movements, impossible speed, etc. It does no client information culling (beyond a large circle of information around the player's position) enabling wallhacks, aimhacks, etc.

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.

Did they make a couple billion? I think that is grossly overestimated.

Depends both on how you define "they" and "make". PUBG Corp has made roughly a couple of billion USD in revenue, but definitely not a couple of billion in profit. (The 2018 numbers were $920M revenue, $311 in profit.)

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 and H1Z1 were the only BRs at the time before the whole BR craze and fortnite came out

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

Basically the battle royale game mode was all they had as an identity. Almost everything else about the game is generic. The graphics look like every asset-flip from the last ten years, music is utterly forgettable, there's just no style. I hate almost everything about Fortnite's style but it does have a distinct one.

Compare Wolfenstein 3D to Doom, except pretend Wolfenstein never had the "Nazis" idea and you were just fighting generic soldiers.

Initially sure, but I think the building capabilities of Unreal and their underlying experience with the engine making contributed to their staying power.

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.

Even if PUBG didn't have all the technical problems, Fortnite still would've been huge. They have different enough audiences - a lot of PUBG players don't like Fortnite (and vice versa). There's overlap sure, but not so much that it's a zero-sum game.

I don't disagree with that idea, after all the market for gamers is so large. But I do know that the ~30 or so people I regularly played with in PUBG left PUBG because of the poor code and cheating to go to other games (most of us went non-BR I think). And even now that we're told that it's better we have no desire to go back. The wounds go too deep. XD

Sure, but this isn't particularly different from any other multiplayer FPS throughout the history of the genre. There's a bunch of common game modes that have been around forever, like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, assault, king of the hill, etc. These game modes were reused repeatedly by pretty much any arena FPS that came out within a span of over a decade. Battle royale and team battle royale are simply the latest (very popular) game modes that most new FPSs are including. Zombie was the previous hot game mode, but that's cooled off a bit now.

I agree - a lot of it...it was the look of the game, the fact it ran smoothly and the building that made a lot of people try it out: I can feel some teenagers going like: "Hey look it's like minecraft but with guns"

but let's not forget the emotes/dances. Those went viral!

Eh, and PubG got it from H1Z1 which got it from DayZ which got it from Minecraft which got it from the Hunger Games movie, etc. Welcome to remix culture.

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.

Fortnite also was very good for having weekly updates of significance. This kept it moving.

Did epic pay the celebrities that used it initially.

PubG was not particularly popular with women. Fortnite is. The success of any social network lives or dies on that one item.

It's important, but I think even more important than women was children and the mobile story behind it. I hear all the time of kids playing fortnite at school and it have a cult like following.

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