This is why I felt bad for the PUBG devs, who seemed to have successfully pushed the Battle Royale genre with a game that wasn't perfect but that they put a lot of effort into, only to be outsold in days by Fortnite upon its release.
Bottom line, I'm not really really feeling bad for PUBG at all. It's kind of like feeling bad for Minecraft because a lot of people are playing Fortnite now. Minecraft made most its money on the purchase. There's some loss in future revenue because of the network effect, but they probably made most the money they were going to make from you already (and to bring it back to PUBG, it's not for everyone. I didn't let my currently 10 year old son play it, but I let him play Fortnite, even a year ago when this was a discussion).
1: https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/19/17478476/playerunknowns-ba...
I don't play either game (unfortunately my system needs a refresh), but from what I've seen of my son playing Fortnite the fights are like nothing I've seen in an FPS before. There's a mad dash to build fortifications right in front of people as quickly as possible as well as break through and navigate these fortifications while under fire. To outside eyes at least, the experience looks qualitatively different.
> I think it's fair to say Epic Games saw the popularity of the genre, pivoted their lackluster game into the genre, and then undercut PUBG on price to rise in popularity.
To my eyes, Fortnite differs in a few very important ways which makes it much more complex than one company copying another and undercutting them.
- It's targetted at a wider range of ages. e.g. it's much more acceptable for parents to allow a younger set of kids to play.
- It has a building mechanic, which changes both the strategy (pre-battle and route planning) and tactics (on-the-fly shielding during live fire) of a game.
- They are constantly updating it. I'm not sure how many "seasons" they are in now, but not only are the changes they introduce often fairly large, the end of season events are quite the spectacle, from the one or two I've seen after the fact.
If you combine that with the fact that PUBG seems to have made at least a few hundred million dollars on what I expect is a few million (or a couple tens of millions at most) investment, and I'm not really all that sorry for them. They had an idea, they executed on it and made a bundle of money, and then someone else iterated on it and happened to make a whole lot more money. What's the alternative, Epic not change Fortnite and all the people that play for free and all the younger players and all the people that like the building mechanic just lose out? I just don't see a situation where PUBG came out on top where more people are better off, and helping PUBG devs make billions instead of hundreds of millions isn't something I think we need to optimize for as a society, nor really care about.
Yes. Either accidentally or on purpose, the Battle Royale genre is a near perfect game type for streaming, which it evolved along side with.
> If a large map you can find stuff on that eventually shrinks qualifies as something enough to differentiate it, doesn't Fortnite's building mechanic qualify enough to differentiate it?
Yes! I am in no way suggesting that devs of Fortnite didn't innovate on the core concept, or that Epic owe the devs of PUBG anything. You're also correct about the wider age appeal and constant updates, though PUBG also receives updates albeit at a slower pace.
But Epic has far far greater resources, and though I don't think game genre's should necessarily be patentable, I do think Fortnite's Battle Royale would not have existed without the success of PUBG, and the fact that they could work off of a skeleton they knew was already tested and successful, especially with the lucrative streaming community.
I don't know about optimizing for society or whatever, it's just games man. I like that both can exist and be successful, while also feeling some sympathy for what could have been for the PUBG devs. Both can be true.
I accept most of what you said. I'm more just defining why I don't really feel sorry for them at all. If they were the inventors of the idea and they never were able to capitalize on it, sure. But they did capitalize on it, and it looks like extremely lucratively. It feels sort of like lamenting that Ford doesn't own more of the auto market given that they popularized (or invented in the modern era) the assembly line that all major automakers use. Ford's doing just fine, and we're all better off for the idea being spread.
It's okay if you don't agree, I just wanted to make sure I expressed myself accurately. :)
Also, I feel that Fortnite's popularity is not just price - a HUGE reason why the game is so popular is that they deliberately went after a broader audience. For example, equal prominence was placed on the female characters (which were deliberately not overly sexualized) and the violence was very much toned down - no blood and guts, no bullet-ridden corpses. These were deliberate design (and marketing) decisions to procure a broader player base and avoid some of the toxicity of the Call of Duty-style games.
I'm not sure it was days, but the part that's kind of galling is that Fortnite was a wave defense game that had some pretty lackluster reviews, so the developers instead turned it into a battle royale game because of PUBG's unexpected popularity, and it was the battle royale version that made waves.