Why Has Fortnite Been So Epic?

How a video game that seems to release new content every fortnight has grown to massive popularity

If you’ve played Fortnite for any serious amount of time, you know that Epic Games, Fortnite’s creators, releases new content for the game frequently. It’s usually in the form of a new item, a vaulted item that they added back, emotes, skins, music, or a new game mode. Fortnite is constantly being changed on many different fronts practically all the time.

53% of Fortnite’s user demographic is between the age of 10–25. Is the rapid iteration of new ideas what makes Fornite popular with younger audiences? Is it the funny dances? The catchy songs? The “thank the bus” feature? Is it the PC players who build so quickly that their sweat from trying so hard stops California from having another drought? Why is this game popular? What is this game?

Who made Fortnite?

Epic Games is game development company that is popular for creating the Unreal Engine. Unreal is a video game engine that is commercially available for other companies to use and develop on. It is regarded as one of the most successful video game engines ever. The Unreal Engine serves as the foundation for Fortnite and many other games such as Gear of Wars, Bioshock, Killing Floor, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Mass Effect, Dishonored, Batman Arkham Aslyum and many many more. Epic Games has been iterating on this engine since the 1990’s; it has been more influential and paramount to Epic Games than Fortnite will ever be.

In 2011 Epic announced a cartoony looking game called Fortnite, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the game became popular with the advent of Battle Royale. Battle Royale is a mode in Fortnite that takes 100 players, and puts them all on one map/level to fight with each other after jumping off a flying bus. Fortnite is hardly the first game to integrate the battle royale genre; games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) existed before Fortnite. PUBG was also developed on Unreal Engine, but was made by different developers.

What does a typical Fortnite match look like?

In Fortnite, most popularly, you can play with other team members (squads), with another teammate (duos), or by yourself (solos). Epic games has added and removed many different game modes, some extending farther than the traditional Battle Royale format. After you’ve decided on your mode, you’ll ready up and be taken to a virtual lobby where other players will load in. When all the players load in, you’ll be taken to a flying bus that is traversing a path along the map across the mainland. You now have to decide when and where you’re going to jump out of the bus. Don’t worry, you have a glider that will ease your descend.

After gliding down from the bus into a most likely alliterative named location (e.g Salty Springs) your mission is to pick up weapons and other items in order to eliminate your opponents who might have landed with you. After you land, sometimes you battle and die, sometimes you battle and survive, other times you land with no one and can loot the location with ease. From there, your goal is to be the last one surviving, but with a twist; a storm is enclosing on the map, and subsequently you have to stay within the circle out of the storm in order to survive. The circle might be far away from where you landed, or you can get lucky and have the circle form on your location. Whatever the case may be, you want to increase your chances of survival by acquiring better loot throughout your journey. Last squad, duo, or single person left standing wins.

So what makes it different than other games?

Fortnite is a video that game that has grown to 250 million players in a quick time frame. It has a massively scaled cross platform capabilities that let console, PC, and mobile players play with each other simultaneously. The game has licensing agreements with other pop/cultural icons, and has featured creative “outside the box” ideas for related game events, using the John Wick series, Marshmello, the Avengers, and other relevant media to make the game more engaging. They also introduced the concept of a Battle Passes and V-bucks. Fortnite is free to play, but if you’d like, you can buy a Battle Pass which levels you up quicker and gets you more skins, emotes, and music. However, these Battle Pass items are purely aesthetic; meaning that just because you spend money on the game, doesn’t mean it’ll make you better. This prevents people buying their way to winning. I haven’t spent a single dollar on this game, and got the free Battle Pass when Fortnite was trying to counter Apex aggressively.

Most importantly, it’s user friendly. Fortnite has been known to integrate User Experience Research into their game design, and it shows. Where PUBG’s UI has smaller elements and text, Fortnite has larger icons, text, but also more intuitive prompts (but can have some bugs). It’s the main reason why I’m not interested in PUBG, but am with Fortnite.

But it did other amazing things as well. It popularized and brought video game streaming into the forefront of mainstream media. Stars like Ninja cropped up. Celebrities were looking to meet Ninja and play video games with him. Twitch T.V., although has been around for awhile, grew to mainstream prominence. The idea of playing video games for a living transformed from a nerds dream into a professional reality. Competitive video gaming started showing up on ESPN 3. Where Starcraft Broodwar brought E-Sports to South Korea, Fortnite has made a large leap in advancing the western countries perception of video gaming as a profession. Overwatch and MOBAS have played their role as well.

Fornite has a lot of unique elements that feel very human. Other games like Apex, have tried and failed to knock Fornite off the Battle Royale leadership board. Whether it be the funny dances, the user research, the twitch streamers, the media partnerships, or even thanking the bus driver, Fortnite has a sense of humor and talent at comical entertainment that has overshadowed other Battle Royale games, and will probably continue to do so in the future.