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If Fortnite Were a Website, It Would Rival Reddit and Amazon (tomsguide.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the flash-in-the-pan dept.

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."

16 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Game of the week by DogDude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've never heard this game until the media started writing about it this past week. Sounds like a currently popular game. Neat?

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    1. Re:Game of the week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Game of the week by Calydor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So it's like Bomberman on the SNES, but with more players?

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    3. Re:Game of the week by Darinbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So popular that gaming sites are being told to popularize it even more. Even slashdot is advertising for it. Such a popular game would never go anywhere unless we spam the world about its existence!

    4. Re:Game of the week by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Funny

      As an anonymous coward, how do we know you're not just blatantly advertising?

    5. Re:Game of the week by rsmith-mac · · Score: 2

      It's been going on for a while now. You may only have heard of it, but your kids have been playing it since late last year.

      It's gotten to the point where my sister's school is in the midst of trying to come up with a better solution to keeping the kids from playing the mobile version of the game during class. The usual threats aren't working; they just go right back to it the next day. (And if they aren't playing about it, then it's all they want to talk about)

    6. Re:Game of the week by Peter+P+Peters · · Score: 2

      So popular that gaming sites are being told to popularize it even more. Even slashdot is advertising for it. Such a popular game would never go anywhere unless we spam the world about its existence!

      I hadn't heard of it so googled it. Most of the results had clickbait headlines "Fortnite is the biggest game on the planet right now" which leads me to believe this is some giant marketing campaign designed to hook people by sensational claims of popularity and FOMO and Slashdot is on the payroll. No doubt we'll see plenty more stories about it in the coming weeks.

    7. Re:Game of the week by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Irrelevant.

      OP's "point" is bullshit.

      I had never heard of it either, until recently. As, it turns out, many of my friends had not either.

      So what do they do? What did I do? Look it up on Google. As did many thousands of other people within a single week.

      A peak in search activity does NOT translate into people actually going there, or playing the game.

      That premise is just ridiculous.

  2. Re: Wait, what? by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Slashdotters: What is this 'Fortnite'? by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's just a pvp game with a slightly different twist. Any place you go to read about it will inevitably be so highly gushing in praise and amazement that you'll never know if it was a paid advertisement or a real review.

  4. Reddit is a failing community, like /. is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re: Wait, what? by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

    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.
  6. Re:Why would you search for "Reddit" though? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

    A dumb fuck where I used to work always went to any website using Google search. His rationale was that the company (this was on his work computer) would keep track of what urls he was going to if he typed the url in directly.

  7. Metacritic scores suggest reviewers being paid off by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re: Wait, what? by Peter+P+Peters · · Score: 2

    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...

  9. Re:Metacritic scores suggest reviewers being paid by Cederic · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.