Battle Royale games are where you have to fight your opponents on a big map, where only one player can win. There are many battle royale games in the industry; some of the most popular ones are Call of Duty, PUBG, and Fortnite. With all of them with their mechanics, one stands out from the rest: Fortnite. Fortnite it’s free, released on July 21, 2017, with 100 players in each battle royale game, with many other game modes like Rocket Racing, Fortnite Save the World, Fortnite Festival, Lego Fortnite, and millions more created by the players. Fortnite had over 650 million people play the game, and 1.8 million people play per day. The question is, how did a game that has been out for 8 years get that popular?
Fortnite originally started with Fortnite Save the World, a zombie survival game, but it didn’t do so well in sales when it was released. When they were struggling, they saw that battle royale games were the top game, so they made their spin on Battle Royale games. They made a map with some of the locations and most of the weapons they copied and pasted from Fortnite Save the World. The difference between other games is that they added a building element where people could get cover, and instead of the realistic military designs, it was a cartoony look. At first, no one was interested in the building idea, but then something happened that changed Fortnite forever.
In 2017, a lot of people who picked up the game were streamers; these streamers had a huge impact on the game, like Tfue, Ninja, and Nick Eh 30. These streamers influence people to play, and these streamers were better than others and introduced new mechanics/bugs that helped you in-game. Which made more people wanna try Fortnite out because of these bugs, but eventually most of these got fixed. For example, invisible edits, ghost peeking, double pump, etc. Also, these streamers influenced people to get better at the game, causing a more competitive side and leading to tournaments giving money to winners like Bugha, who won 3 million dollars in the Fortnite World Cup. Fortnite gave these streamers something to talk about, and to film about, so they became popular and the game.
Another thing they did to impact the game was how they earned money for in-game cosmetics. Fortnite changed how these in-game cosmetics worked with wanting people to buy the battle pass, and in the battle pass, if they collected and earned more levels, they got more V-bucks than how much they originally bought it for. They also had their item shop, but the thing that made it different from others is that the item shop changed every day, kinda making people buy the cosmetics now because they might not see the cosmetics ever again. Since the time resets, sometimes items don’t come out for a long time, like more than a year. For example, the most recent case of this has the Psycho Bandit skin from Borderlands III It was released 5 years ago, but it recently came back. In Fortnite, they have lots of collabs with outside media like Marvel, Star Wars, and Singers. They also add weapons/consumables about the collabs, and most of the time, these come out when a movie/game comes out.
Fortnite does monthly updates, but between these updates things they create seasons which change their theme of the season, adding
new weapons, features, and cosmetics. Sometimes, after a year or so, they make new Chapters that are less than 5 seasons in there and change the map. In Chapter 1, Season 3, Fortnite invented the first-ever Live Event in gaming history, where all the players playing the game at the same time saw something called the Rocket Event, where a rocket went into the sky and created a rift. Fortnite even has its game lore, with many different storylines people have to keep up with to understand it. The current season, at the time when I’m writing this, is Chapter 6, Season 2, a Heist season about raiding vaults, stealing gold, and Exotics.
With all of these additions, Fortnite has been made from the start of the game 8 years ago it has made a lot of major achievements/changes. Fortnite won the Game Award for Best Multiplayer Game (2018), the British Academy Games Award for Evolving Game (2019), the Game Award for Best Ongoing Game (2018 and 2019), and the Teen Choice Award for Choice Video Game (2018). Fortnite changed how most battle royale/survival games did things for a while, then running the game for a while and being popular still is massively surprising. So, the next time you play Fortnite, look at its humble beginnings 8 years ago.