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Epic Games, the Creator of Fortnite, Banked a $3 Billion Profit in 2018: Report (techcrunch.com)
This year Fortnite became the world's most popular game, growing its parent company, Epic Games' valuation to $15 billion. It also helped the company pile up cash. Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year fueled by the continued success of Fortnite, TechCrunch reported Thursday, citing a person with knowledge of the business. From the report: Fortnite, which is free to play but makes money selling digital items, has popularized the battle royale category -- think Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games -- almost single-handedly, and it has been the standout title for the U.S.-based game publisher. Founded way back in 1991, Epic hasn't given revenue figures for its smash hit -- which has 125 million players -- but this new profit milestone, combined with other pieces of data, gives an idea of the success the company is seeing as a result of a prescient change in strategy made six years ago.
Gog, Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, whatever the heck Bethesda calls theirs and now Epic's. If I got less DRM (especially Denuvo, which has been shown to kill frame times) or better prices maybe. But so far it's just more logins and more hassle. At least with Gog I can save the games to a DVD and be done with it.
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I'm pretty sure a large portion of that $3billion came from licensing the Unreal Engine, AKA the engine that powers almost every game on the market not being made in Unity.
Fortnite was a flop. The Battle Royale mode was a slap dash add on to a failed game. They snuck into a market niche that was wide open: Free BR game with an approachable aesthetic. They monitized it very well without cries of "Pay to Win". PubG is only now starting to catch up in terms of functional sustaining revenue, and they have already lost the majority of their player base.
Those were called arcade cabinets. Those games were literally designed to keep you pumping in quarters. That's why they were so hard plus had the garish lights of vegas slot machines.
Now we're looking at more subtle psychological manipulations. Instead of playing on fears of not finishing something you started, they're playing on the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This is part of how their gambling mechanics grab you. Didn't get the one piece of flair you wanted? Just try again, but give me a buck to do so. Didn't get it? Just try again, but give me a buck to do so.
You're half right, but don't totally have it. It's not instragram at all anymore. Fortnight replaced it.
From my coworkers with pre-teens and teens, Fortnight became the new social network. It became the new social currency. The kids acted out the victory dances on stage, on the ball field, in the classroom, and on the playground. The social currency became buying the limited dance moves for your character, learning them, and being able to drop them at a moment's notice to blow your friends' minds.
Fortnight became a meta-game, where playing was important, but being able to abstract it into the real world was what was valuable. Nobody cared or remembered who won what match the other weekend, but they did when you were introduced on the basketball court and did a stupid dance from the game.
It was still definitely more appearance than substance, but what's critical to understand is that it is its own social network, and the real life acting out of the game was the real social currency, not IG posts or facebook posts, or anything else online. That's what made Fortnight different, and what made it $3b.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I was playing those games in the 80s and 90s, and enjoyed them a lot.
Today, I probably wouldn't. Because gaming has evolved and I have grown up. I don't think being hard for the sake of being hard is a virtue.
But what I do enjoy are games that are not holding your hand. I like open world games for exactly this reason. I like games that don't spoon-feed you the story, but at the same time are forgiving to mistakes. At the moment I'm playing Subnautica and it doesn't even have an in-game map - but if you die, you respawn back at your base with minimal losses. Many other games have evolved to be like that - instead of forcing you to save the game every 30 seconds, they let you die without punishing you too harshly.
I'm also a big fan of Nethack, with its one-life-that's-it system.
It all depends on the game and what it tries to accomplish. The problem with Nintendo-era jump-n-run games, for example, was that they forced you to replay the same part of the game a hundred times just because at the end of the sequence you failed that one jump again and again. A better game would start you closer and closer to the point where you fail the more often you need to replay, so it becomes less tedious and you can focus on the part that actually challenges you.
I'm also not a fan of adaptive difficulty. Who the fuck came up with that? I used to play Doom and its successors on the hardest difficulty initially, then after dying a lot start a game with medium difficulty, and the skills I learnt at hard made it really enjoyable. In the first Eldar Scrolls games or LOTRO etc. I very much enjoyed working my way up and then being able to beat enemies that used to be difficult to a pulp with a grin, and that was satisfying. Then with Skyrim they added adaptive difficulty and all enemies were tough but not too tough. No more satisfaction of taking down an overwhelming enemy through cunning and luck, and no more satisfaction of beating a low-level one to a pulp.
A lot of things are better in games today than they used to be, and a lot of things went downhill. And sometimes a game comes along that cherry-picks the right choices from both sets and that is when everything just works and creates a masterpiece.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org