Slashdot Mirror
If Fortnite Were a Website, It Would Rival Reddit and Amazon (tomsguide.com)
Tom's Guide gives us some perspective on just how big of a cultural phenomenon the game Fortnite is: "if Fortnite were a website, it would be one of the top five in the United States." From the report: Take a quick look at Alexa's list of top U.S. websites, and you'll see Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Amazon in the top five. No surprises there. But as a quick Google Trends search reveals, Fortnite has become a hotter search term than Reddit. What some might see as a flash-in-the-pan gaming fad is actually outpacing one of the web's hottest destinations.
"More people in the U.S. are searching for 'Fortnite' on Google than they are for 'Reddit' and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company. "When you consider that Fortnite had more than 3 million concurrent players in February, I believe that if Fortnite were a website, it would be among the top five in the U.S., duking it out with Reddit and Amazon."
"More people in the U.S. are searching for 'Fortnite' on Google than they are for 'Reddit' and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company. "When you consider that Fortnite had more than 3 million concurrent players in February, I believe that if Fortnite were a website, it would be among the top five in the U.S., duking it out with Reddit and Amazon."
So you've been living under a rock. Fortnite is a free-to-play game, famous mostly for riding the "battle royale" wave created by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which is the other big game that you probably haven't heard about. Players parachute into a huge open map where they can fight other players and collect items. After a while, a shrinking "force field" appears. Anyone who stays or moves outside the shrinking area continuously takes damage. This forces the players to congregate and fight. Last player alive wins.
I think you're missing the history here though. Fortnite was originally not a 'battle royale' style game at all, and many of the early supporters (and people that put money into it) feel betrayed by its switch in focus. They very much drop the review scores.
Then there's the ongoing changes that any online game gets. A great online game may be changed by the developers to try and keep players engaged and interested, but invariably some of the original community will dislike the changes - the switch to Battle Royale being a prime example.
While those changes may result in new players with a positive view of the game, they're also likely to result in poor reviews from players who feel aggrieved at the perceived damage to their entertainment of choice.
It's one reason Steam now differentiates between overall and recent reviews.