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> (I’m trying to think of other good examples of this effect in the business domain but coming up short. Anyone?)

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.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063362

I remember Larry Chiang. Whatever happened to him? He always seemed so lacking of substance but somehow figured out how to show up everywhere. Is he actually the international man of mystery who made it big but keeps his secrets to himself, or just a con artist barely making it by living in a cheap apartment? Obviously the world isn't that black and white but I really wonder what happens to people like him.

Sketch, from Bohemian, did something that feels like this.

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.

Looks like it’s already happening: Figma and Framer X are quickly gaining ground.

I think the lesson is that execution (and marketing) are everything. Unreal is a quake rip. Fortnite is a pubg rip. But they executed extremely well. So well that they feel fresh and not like a rip.

I mean, just one big reason Fortnite doesn't feel like a pubg rip is because Fortnite's building/editing mechanic sets it completely apart.

Watch one of the Fortnite world cup matches going on right now [1] and tell me that you're watching a pubg rip :)

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/436713934?t=42m25s

A quake rip? Not at all. Unreal games always meant to be tech demos so their primary business objective: licensing out the engine became successful. The unreal engine was also one of the first engine with proper edit / scripting tools arround it. They already had them in the 90s with unrealed. Id software with quake did not really have such a license model (apart from some examples) Even today the idtech engine is not build to just license out to other companies.

I’d argue that the very first Unreal was a game first, a tech demo later. So was Unreal Tournament (based on Unreal Engine 1, IIRC), Unreal Tournament 2003, and – this one for sure – Gears of War.

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.

> 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.

> Maybe I wouldn’t call them Quake rips though; However, all the Unreals certainly weren’t innovative in any meaningful way, gameplay wise.

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

Everybody here is missing why this game became so popular, and it's very common trap with the game. Its the reason why the game has also been so polarizing. I've played the game steadily for over a year now, so I have a bit of a grip on what happened/is going on.

- 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.

You are completely right about the mechanics, I've played it some with the step-son and I can't get the hang of it, I've played FPS on and off over the years and I'm not bad at them but it just doesn't fit my mental model.

Which delights him immensely how badly I suck :).

Same - I don't totally suck in FPS and can put up at least decent fight all the way back to Doom II which we also tried in the interest of software history. But I get thoroughly spanked in Fortnite, every time.

Exactly right. I improved the most in Fortnite by just landing in a corner (pre creative mode) and practicing building, editing, build-shooting, the same way I would work on combos in fighting games.

This reminds me of a little-known game called Worms 2. Someone figured out how to hack the weapon properties and effectively created a surge in popularity around this game for a new type called a "rope game". It's still one of the most fun and skillful games I've ever played. But this was back in the 90s, so in-game purchases weren't a thing.

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.

Oh I wouldn't call Worms "little-known". The whole series was a pretty big success in the 90s

Relatively speaking it was pretty tiny compared to the big EA games at the time. Apparently it only made $1.7M its entire life.

Huge Roper fan here since Worms Armageddon! It was all because the Team17 devs allowed to mod game maps and weapon configs so easily. Creativity then kicked in and roper games became a stable online thing! Also BnG and "Shoppa"

It's not so much learning speed, but it being a level playing field. Old gamers who have been fpsing since Doom / Quake / TF2 / whatever might be capable of learning Fortnite, but they won't dominate it without spending thousands of hours on it. Kids will spend time getting good, because they have more free time and they enjoy it because for once they don't get destroyed by the fps crowd.

"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."

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.

I like this observation. You could argue that Salesforce did the same thing pivoting from CRM into the platform as a service market. They had the user management, security, configuration tools, reporting, etc, that they were able to take into marketing, call center, etc.

Blizzard with Overwatch comes to mind. But it's pretty much the same scenario.

Netflix might also be a good example shifting from DVD renting to streaming.

Overwatch is an entirely new game that wasn't spun from another, existing IP. everything in that game is original.

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 is only original in the sense that the IP didn't exist. There's a pretty decent (probably to be taken with a pinch of salt) article from Eurogamer which summarises an AMA and a few old articles and explains how OW came from "Titan" - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-14-blizzards-jeff...

GP's examples are more applicable to the question posed about late-stage pivots. IP is not the point. It's about having a particular business objective / product in development whose assets were redeployed to realize a different vision.

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.

Never heard of Team Fortress 2?

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.

Overwatch is basically Blizzard's take on Team Fortress 2, which became a stand alone game from the old mod Team Fortress from Quake/QuakeWorld when Valve picked up the IP from the original creators John Cook and Robin Walker.

This is a very accurate assessment. It was a real effective marketing team combined with a very smart pivot to an adjacent market and hitting product market fit.epic games tried and tried and tried (paragon, recent attempts to revitalize unreal tournament, etc) and eventually they got a huge hit.

Yeah, it's like the Picasso napkin thing. Fortnite wasn't an overnight success, it was decades in the making. I had so much hype for the new Unreal Tournament, but after seeing how that was handled I never even gave Paragon a shot. I'm glad Epic Games eventually figured things out.

Slack's creation might fit this formula, too. What started out as an in-game chat function in the ultra-competitive gaming world turned out to be a dazzling workplace communication tool.

Apple using its iPod and Mac experience to enter (smart)phones?

I disagree. There was no magic trick here. Unreal is a company built with the best and brightest in the games industry over a very long period. I don't think any other company could have replicated their success - they just don't have that level of talent density.