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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."
I've never heard this game until the media started writing about it this past week. Sounds like a currently popular game. Neat?
I don't respond to AC's.
Everyone knows about it already. Not many people know about the latest games. If it is featured in articles (like this one) people will search for it to find out what it is.
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That's barely a year old and remember how it was some national obsession? Now you don't hear shit about it anymore. Why? Because people move on. People will move on from Fortnite too.
It'd be in the top five! If fortnight were furniture store it'd be the largest! If fortnight were a website and named Facebook it'd be in the top!
I am too lazy to google (/. gives better answers anyway), and never heard of the game so far.
Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google. To them, that is the way the internet works. Smart bars were not born out of convenience, but from endless support tickets from idiots about not being able to get to a website. Most browsers even hide the full URL as the site of this terrified many a folk. These are the same people who clicked the punch the monkey banner ads and fucked up the web for the rest of us.
I was in college when I played Doom and my roommate played Pokémon. We also played Magic The Gathering card game in the wee hours. Slashdot came along a few years later.
In my opinion, reddit is failing due to the same factors that sunk /. from being the premier technology discussion site into near total irrelevance today. In both cases we've seen abusive moderation of various forms create an intolerant 'circle-jerk' environment where original thoughts are quashed. This prevents new participants from staying very long, while the existing community ends up dwindling over time. Soon the community loses the momentum it once had, and thus begins to become less and less relevant each day. Even if the site is still operational some years later, like /. still is, it's a pathetic disgrace compared to what it once was, before abusive moderation created a rotten environment where adhering to ideology matters more than having intelligent discussion.
Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google.
We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
didn't this flavor of the week get slashvertised two days ago?
Apparently Reddit is more popular than Amazon, yet the Google Trends for amazon vs reddit shows the opposite.
https://trends.google.com/tren...
The number of people who google "youtube" is even higher.
The numbers for "google" are even higher again.
Fortnite's metascore (average of reviews) is 77 for PS4, 78 for PC. Its user ratings are 4.7 (out of 10) for PS4, 3.4 for PC. That sort of divergence between review and user ratings is usually a pretty good indication that reviewers are being paid to promote the game.
What a stupid title... I know they are trying to get people to associated usage with something tangible, but comparing it to a website is silly. And the number of searches has no numerical purpose at all; apart from people who may have heard of it and searched it but will probably never play it.
He's an 18 year old that doesn't annoy me. I like Fortnite but not that good at it, I guess I play Fortnite through him.
Fortnite is very popular at the moment, as are Fortnite streams on Twitch.tv and Youtube.
I started watching when he had some 300K youtube subscribers, now over 800K and pulling in 20K a day now.
Most browsers even hide the full URL as the site of this terrified many a folk.
I know that when I see a URL it scares the hell out of me. What is all that technobabble? If I don't understand it, it's clearly a liberal conspiracy designed to take my guns off me...
Not a nice thing but since it's free to play it's not as bad as if you had to pay 60 bucks upfront. If you don't like it just stop playing and you haven't lost any money just a bit of time.
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.
That sort of divergence between review and user ratings is usually a pretty good indication
of business as usual in the game reviewing world.
"if Fortnite were a website, it would be one of the top five in the United States."
But as a quick Google Trends search reveals, Fortnite has become a hotter search term than Reddit.
Er ... the one thing does not follow from the other. At all.
Maybe everybody is just searching to see what the heck all this astroturfing is talking about?
If Fortnight was a book, how many libraries of congress would it rival?
I guess i'm part of the problem. I kind of gave up on synchronizing bookmarks across the three different devices that i primarily use, so if something isn't immediately available in the URL history i'll just google it. I figure Google is a lot more likely to notice if i accidentally type "redddit" or "redit" than i am.
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I'm pretty sure Pokemon Go had pretty huge initial adoption when it came out in the summer of 2016. Judging based on download numbers isn't all that useful, but it still had a pretty big uptake for at least a few weeks, tapering down after that.
For that matter, never having played it it sounds like Fortnite is similar to what you find on many Minecraft servers (Factions, Survival with PvP), but built into the game and as the default instead of something you need to be shown how to get to. Basically they looked at where Minecraft had business holes (no good model for subscription or transaction revenue back to Mojang/Microsoft) and built something to capture the ongoing revenue that in the MC world goes to third parties running servers.
fencepost
just a little off
It should become common experience then.
Everquest and its successor Everquest 2 are still going and get xpacs
If I were a potato, I would be a world record potato. What relevance is that to anything, since I'm (probably) not a potato. And Fortnite is not a website.
Anyone remember Slashdot?
So it's a bit like what happened to Gnome?
The solution's the same - create their own version. They could call it Forknite.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it's so bad why is it so popular?
Fortnite is going to be as big as Facebook, as popular as AOL, as enduring as Sun Microsystems.
Find a better use for your time.
Watching may have a different meaning to you and I.
He streams a lot so have him playing all the time - in the backgound. I'm used to a tv playing while computing, but the commercials
over free tv (antenna) are obnoxious enough to find an alternative. But something has to be on TV for ambience.
But I've gathered enough tricks from him to help my son play some decent games. So it's been working pretty well.
We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
That was included in one of the proposals for universal document identifiers, before URLs and URIs took over. Instead of typing "http://ford.com", you would type "Ford Motor Co." and the two would be identical to the machine. Not a search, but a lookup.
That layer has never been developed, and the need was mostly obviated by the rise of search engines.