Slashdot Mirror
'Fortnite' Creator Sees Epic Games Becoming as Big as Facebook, Google (variety.com)
The company behind "Fortnite" wants to become the next Facebook or Google, said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. The idea isn't much of a stretch. From a report: While "Fortnite" began life as a relatively mundane game it continues to evolve, first by adding a battle royale mode, and then by leaning on the game's massive install base to turn the title into something more akin to a social platform that can host concerts, tell stories, and inspire creativity. Sweeney points to the game's popularity as a "mass-market streaming phenomenon," the moment when "Fortnite" player teamed up with musician Drake in-game, and when the game played host to about 10 million people in a live, in-game Marshmello concert. "We feel the game industry is changing in some major ways," he said. "'Fortnite' is a harbinger of things to come. It's a massive number of people all playing together, interacting together, not just playing but socializing."
"In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers, they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate." Flush with a relatively recent $1.25 billion investment from a half-dozen investment firms and the steady flow of cash from both "Fortnite" and Epic Game's Unreal game engine, Sweeney has big plans for the company.
"In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers, they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate." Flush with a relatively recent $1.25 billion investment from a half-dozen investment firms and the steady flow of cash from both "Fortnite" and Epic Game's Unreal game engine, Sweeney has big plans for the company.
Google is a massive hub for information. Facebook is a social hub for most people. Fortnite's a pretty decent PUBG clone that happens to run on lower end hardware. It's hit a critical mass that means it's probably not going away or anything. But, well, I thought the same thing about Angry Birds....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Facebook is a social hub for most people.
That is not true anymore, especially for younger people.
Fortnite has had huge gains in adoption, and has gone way beyond where Angry Birds was in terms of cultural impact - they are even attending concerts in Fortnite now, and lots of people watch streamers play which was never the case with Angry Birds. So it too is a kind of social community, especially the streams...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Remember when everyone thought this about Second life? https://slashdot.org/story/06/...
Sounds like this might be a repeat of history
Epic Game Store is shit though.
No email authentication (pretty basic, no?) so people can sign up with your email address. Near-constant friend request spam (from bots/scammers). No social 'facilities' beyond basic friends list and basic chat. It's not a social network, it's just a platform where people can meet in a game and maybe get together on a proper social network elsewhere.
Also, fuck Epic for their exclusivity deals on their shitty platform.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
You've had one hit game. You're not a cultural revolution, snowflake.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm old, and I play Fortnite frequently. The real concern with Fortnite is that people will spend much of the time they used to spend on other apps playing Fortnite instead, not about it doing what the other apps do. The CEO of Netflix recently said something about being more concerned with competition from Fortnite than with other streaming services, but he was talking about it stealing attention.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
The crash is coming and fast.
When you're doing all that data slurping through the rootkit that is Easy Anti-Cheat and such.
The Chinese must love you for that, given you're already 40-ish percent owned by Tencent.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A lot of people in the other comments seem to have not understood what is being suggested here.
The summary talks about a virtual concert that was held with 10 million attendees, using the Fortnite game engine. They're not saying Fortnite the game is going to be this new social thing, they're saying that Fortnite's engine and existing player base is the basis for a new social platform.
If they swing it right, this could be the first online VR world that gets some semblance of mass adoption. It won't be quite like what is pictured in Ready Player One but that's the direction they're heading in.
I think given their existing fanbase and technology they're in a better position to achieve this than any of the other online behemoths. The only question is whether VR tech is good enough / cheap enough to achieve this, or if it's still not quite ready for prime time. Because if they can't use VR then this is likely to go the way that Second Life did - gain a respectable following and some mainstream mindshare, but eventually peter out.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are all working on online game streaming services - Google and Apple have announced Stadia and Arcade and Microsoft and Amazon are going to announce theirs later this year. Nintendo and Sony appear to be missing. But what Epic are suggesting here is a different pivot that looks like it is ahead of the competition, which suggests they're ahead of the curve and therefore could rapidly hoover up a new market before anyone else gets a look-in, the way Amazon did with their cloud offering and Netflix did with online streaming.
You probably don't know this. Epic have had more than just one hit game.
First released game appeared in 1992 as Epic (and one before that in 1991 with another company name) I really dare you to put out a full blown release of a game software product running on just one platform, even with today's free tools and git-ware. It takes a lot more time than you can imagine.
In Those 30 years, the tiny company Epic managed to outsmart Id, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Valve, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take2, Vivendi, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Capcom, TT, SquareEnix Sierra, Dynamics, Microprose, ActiBliz, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Mojang, Dice, Treyarch, Bethesda and many more. That's a hell of lot of industry competition to handle. They did not simply manage, they were setting the rules at every step of the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Uh - huh
If I'm not mistaken, this is exactly what Second Life* was supposed to provide ?
( and look where it is today )
*or any MMORPG for that matter
A decade from now if you're still pulling in the big $$$ and keeping your user base ( Think Blizzard with WoW ) then we can start talking about how amazing you think you are. ( I'm certainly no WoW fan, but the $$$ Blizzard has made from the franchise is the aspiration of what every game developer hopes to create )
This guy was a murderous barber, wasn't he?
The problem with that idea is that what may be a hit today may not be a hit tomorrow. Gamers eventually get bored of an idea and move on to the next.
Remember when zombie games were the rage, or the endless World War 2 games? Yes they're still here today, but they certainly arent as big as they once were, which was boiling hot, a point where Fortnite currently is today in its oversaturated Battle Royale genre market, which, by the way, is simply a tweak on the Death Match genre that John Romero coined as ID was putting together a multiplayer Doom.