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Fortnite Was 2018's Most Important Social Network (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Epic Games managed to produce a hit, sure, but the genius of it is how it's rewritten the idea of what hanging out online can be. Fortnite is a game, but it's also a global living room for millions of people, and a kind of codex for where culture has gone this year -- it's a cultural omnibus that's absorbed everything from Blocboy JB's shoot dance to John Wick. It got Ted Danson to learn how to floss. This thing is here to stay, as a new kind of social network.
Fortnite has achieved such a massive scale partially because of those network effects -- if all of your friends are hanging out there, you will be too. The game is both free to play and available on every device -- consoles, computers, even phones. That's created a kind of lingua franca, a base level of understanding among a large group of people about the experience of playing the game. And even though it's hugely popular, the experience of playing is extremely specific -- not so many people outside your peer group are going to know what you mean if you reference a "chug jug" in casual conversation. There's an in group thing going on here.
Fortnite has achieved such a massive scale partially because of those network effects -- if all of your friends are hanging out there, you will be too. The game is both free to play and available on every device -- consoles, computers, even phones. That's created a kind of lingua franca, a base level of understanding among a large group of people about the experience of playing the game. And even though it's hugely popular, the experience of playing is extremely specific -- not so many people outside your peer group are going to know what you mean if you reference a "chug jug" in casual conversation. There's an in group thing going on here.
They'll be gone in a few months and you'll all be drooling over the next meme platform, hard pass. This article is a joke. Find real content or die trying.
... who just happens to write for The Verge, perchance?
#DeleteChrome
And Digg was the news site. It will be replaced by an even more cringy game. The generation that grew up playing moshi monsters will be adults soon, and will make their own game network.
3 hours to copy stuff from the disc to the PS4. Really? At least I can download Fortnight. 5 hour download? Really? And What's This Feature? It's downloading at 20% the speed of the internet I'm paying for.
It's effin Christmas, I got a toy, I want to play with my toy. dafuq?
Tune in tomorrow, when I tell you how much I like BOPS4 (not expecting much, didn't like 1 and 2, skipped 3), and Fortnight (not expecting much, players with 1+ year experience will use n00bs like me to rank up experience points.
PS: BOPS4 downloaded, now is downloading an 8 hour patch. What happened to the days when you ran off to 7/11 to buy batteries?
PPS: Tune in tomorrow, when I actually get to play my Christmas gift.
PPPS: I've done the math, both the BOPS4 and Fortnight download combined are at 20% of what I'm paying for.
I'm old enough to have been playing online games for almost 20 years.
My experience is that half of the fun from an online game comes from the game itself, and the other half from the people you play with. What the article describes, I have experienced it with other games. For me, 5 years ago it was Minecraft, 7 years ago it was D&D Online, 10 years ago it was Day of Defeat Source, 12 years ago it was World of Warcraft, 16 years ago it was Diablo 2, 18 years ago it was the original Counter Strike. Fun games on their own right, but many days I would just play to hang out with people. Of those, Day of Defeat Source was the game in which I had the most fun, the community was small but fantastic.
Anyway, enough for the old time rant. Let the kids (and the adults) enjoy Fortnite. The fad will pass and in a few years few of them will still be playing it, but the memories of the good times will live on forever.
Does anyone remember "second life"? You know, the one where they told the industry "journalists" they were the biggest thing ever with a gazillion people using it, and it turned out they were simply using the advanced marketing technique known as "lying".
And the industry "journalists" were engaging in the common practice of "going along with it", because you know, you've got to write about something, and a phoney trend is better than nothing.
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Just because The Verge claimed it was doesn't make it so. In fact it makes it completely unlikely and false.
Just another day in Paradise
So if you don't know why Fortnite is popular right now, then you probably aren't in a family unit and/or don't have kids. This is one of the very few games out now that the whole family can get in to with minimal cost, and can have kids, mom and dad all playing together. It's going to get replaced eventually, sure....but for now, Epic Games has hit a rare formula of solid gold for an underserved market and is reaping the profits.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, and others have been doing this for a long time and still are. In fact, in just three months time it will be two full decades for Everquest.
Fortnite is a fad. Hardly anybody outside of the gamersphere has even heard of it. My aunt in Kansas certainly hasn't!
Based on published statistics, Pokemon Go had twice as many players as Fortnite, but where is Pokemon Go now? Yeah, it's still around, but you don't see people wondering aimlessly around hunting for pokemon any more.
Fortnite won't be any different. If you're a Fortnite enthusiast, this article makes sense. To the rest of us, it's just another fad, or something we've never even heard of.