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Free To Play, Expensive To Love: 'Fortnite' Changes Video Game Business (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: To see the storm that online video game "Fortnite" has unleashed on the world, just visit Jett Sacher in Brooklyn. The 13-year-old spends an hour or two every day on the game with his friends and is not afraid to spend his pocket money on it - bit by bit. "So I bought one dance, two skins and the battle pass," Sacher told Reuters TV about recent gaming sessions. "So that's, I spent $20 on both skins so $40 ... and the dance was another $10 so $50, 60 bucks, something like that."
Sacher's pay-as-you-go expenditure on dressing up his online avatar in the 'free-to-play' game helped "Fortnite" take in an estimated $223 million from in-game purchases in March, according to Joost Van Dreunen at research firm SuperData. "Fortnite," a sort of hybrid of "The Hunger Games" and "Minecraft," drops 100 people onto an island to fight each other for survival. It is a game-changer in the industry, analysts have said, because of the huge revenue it is making from "tween" and teenage boys purchasing outfits and other add-ons. Its publisher, Epic Games, is now worth $4.5 billion, according to an estimate. Further reading: Gamers are the new stars. Esports arenas are the new movie theaters (The New York Times).
Sacher's pay-as-you-go expenditure on dressing up his online avatar in the 'free-to-play' game helped "Fortnite" take in an estimated $223 million from in-game purchases in March, according to Joost Van Dreunen at research firm SuperData. "Fortnite," a sort of hybrid of "The Hunger Games" and "Minecraft," drops 100 people onto an island to fight each other for survival. It is a game-changer in the industry, analysts have said, because of the huge revenue it is making from "tween" and teenage boys purchasing outfits and other add-ons. Its publisher, Epic Games, is now worth $4.5 billion, according to an estimate. Further reading: Gamers are the new stars. Esports arenas are the new movie theaters (The New York Times).
I know modern graphics and shaders are a bitch to program, but that does not compute. Especially for a relatively low poly game like Fortnight. Nice work if you can get it. But it sucks for us old timers who want single player games or at least to just buy a game and call it a day.
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Because free-to-play and making money on cosmetics has been around for several years. You speak of it as if it's a new phenomena.
I've played fortnite BR and it's not pay to play. If you don't buy any outfits, you'll just get randomly assigned one of the default ones, and the dances/emotes aren't needed for anything. The stuff you can buy doesn't affect the gameplay
> Minecraft (win 10)
*facepalm*
You are doing it wrong.
Play the Java version which is free of all that bullshit.
Ex professional game developer here. (I've shipped games on PS1, PS2, PC, Wii, DS, and helped numerous companies with their PS3 engines and toolchain. Left the professional industry in 2011 for a stable paycheck but I do my own (indie) game programming and design now, am a hardcore gamer, and help fellow game developers with advice.)
Sorry for the LONG read, but think I can lend some information that will be insightful and not inciteful. =P
> why we still haven't seen modders, foss developers and artists get together to build their own games.
We have, but on a limited scale.
TL:DR;
* Tech Hurdle
* Too many cooks in the kitchen
* Co-dependency upon the Game Engine and everything else
* Theory vs Implementation
* The "good" modders get "poached"
The LONG answer:
There are numerous reasons for this:
* Tech Hurdle
The first hurdle was the tech hurdle. Up until recently writing a "general purpose engine" was folly. Was the game 2D or 3D? If 3D, you HAD to optimize for indoor or outdoor environments for the most part with various kludges to support the other. If you notice both Unity and Unreal now offer a "2D" mode -- Unity with 2D Game Kit and Unreal with Paper2D
Examples where tech matters:
Trying to do "dense jungle environments" in a 3D shooter was basically a recipe of framerate FAIL until Crysis came along:
We "solved" this problem by basically throwing more money at hardware (GPU / CPUs)
How does the engine handle the "contradictory" nature of transparency?
* Opaque objects can be rendered front-to-back using the hardware's "Early Z Test".
* Transparent objects need to be rendered back-to-front so you get the correct colors.
How does an engine handle thousands of lights?
* Deferred rending "solves" this problem but doesn't work for transparency. DOH!
People are using hybrid approaches of Forward Render vs Deferred Render. If the "big boys" are STILL figuring this out, Unity 2018.1 with their High Definition Render Pipeline (HD RP) (Preview) -- what chance does amateurs have? Yes, we see engines like Irrlicht but that is a steep learning curve for non-technical people.
We've seen SOME limited success. Back when Quake 2 was popular we Cube 2: Sauerbraten as a good example of the community coming together to produce something "good."
Open Source engines have typically performed like crap. I've posted in the past
How many people own Jason's quintessential engine development book Game Engine Architecture? How many understand it?
* Too many cooks in the kitchen.
C++ is "good" example of "Design by committee." Everybody has their favorite pet peeve bloating the core user experience until it is an over-engineered clusterfuck.
You'll notice that almost all of the