Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it even more odd that I can't figure why they did not reference the literal movie 'Battle Royale' that the concept was roughly based on?
I always saw it as inspired by the Hunger Games, which in turn captured the zeitgeist of the post-2001 and post-2008 society.
Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
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Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#72I don't really like Fortnite, but I'm really really happy for Epic's success. PUBG was a flaming dumpster heap that only caught on because the Battle Royale mechanic is naturally fun and people were clamoring for that type of game. But it was an unqualified mess from a subpar developer, and that always annoyed me because gamers deserved better. Now Epic has been rescued from sliding into obscurity and they've got mas…
"Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry? PUBG sold 50 million copies. It is the 5th highest selling game in history. You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.
That's why I added "outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem". PUBG was incredibly big yes, but parents weren't asking questions about their children's addiction to PUBG and talk shows didn't have long segments about PUBG. Fortnite became a place for people to hang out: https://twitter.com/anoopr/status/1071921080485457920
My brother, a college football player, plays it. My sister, an Instagram addict and high schooler, plays it on her phone while shopping at, I dunno, Forever 21 I guess.
This is new, and worth paying attention to.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#74Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#75I don't really like Fortnite, but I'm really really happy for Epic's success. PUBG was a flaming dumpster heap that only caught on because the Battle Royale mechanic is naturally fun and people were clamoring for that type of game. But it was an unqualified mess from a subpar developer, and that always annoyed me because gamers deserved better. Now Epic has been rescued from sliding into obscurity and they've got mas…
"Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?
It means they deserve better than all the garbage that's been pushed out over the last 5 years or so since Unity and Unreal became free, and Steam relaxed its submission standards. There's been a massive wave of terrible "games" that people are just forced to accept because they don't know any better.
I'm not hating on indie game devs in general, there are of course plenty of amazing ones. But the real problem is this trend of a small group of devs forming a "studio", coming up with really ambitious plans for a huge game after learning Unity for a month, and then releasing early access garbage like PUBG and abandoning it when they realize making a triple-A game takes years of effort by a vast team of expert professionals.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steam has been doing this for awhile. CS:GO, DotA2, etc come to mind.
TF2 was arguably Valve’s first testbed in this space.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#77I think it is commendable that Epic used some of this profit to change their Unreal Engine Marketplace rates in favour of the developers. Similar to their store that is mentioned in the article, the revenue split is now 88/12. This change will be applied retroactively to all past transactions [1]. My understanding is the split was previously 70/30 as common in other online stores—those should be some hefty payouts fo…
EDIT: From what I remember, the only games on the Epic launcher were Unreal Tournament, Paragon, Fortnite and Shadow Complex.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides PUBG, who else has done this in a successful way? Fortnite wasn’t the original but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point. I’m okay with “PUBG + Fortnite” ~= “almost single handedly”. I think the key word in that quote is popularized — even if earlier games did it, these are the two to demonstrate widespread appeal.
Also worth pointing out that PUBG uses unreal, so Epic Games makes money off the royalties AND gets visibility into the PUBG sales data. It's very likely that seeing those numbers made Epic Games shift focus.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry? PUBG sold 50 million copies. It is the 5th highest selling game in history. You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.
Compared to Fortnite, 50 million isn't that much.
Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can be debated. Although Rust/H1Z1/PUBG were certainly popular battle royale games before Fortnite, Fortnite was the only one that brought it mainstream , outside the hardcore gamer ecosystem.
I'm sorry? PUBG sold 50 million copies. It is the 5th highest selling game in history. You can't honestly claim that's not mainstream.
I see that minimaxir has been downvoted so it seems "mainstream" has different meanings.
I don't play video games and don't keep up with them. I've never heard of PUBG. But nevertheless, I did hear about Fortnite. Why? Because a business analyst on Youtube did a business case study[0] about Epic Games and the development history of Fortnite. That was unusual because he typically analyzes non-game companies[1] like Amazon, Uber, Stripe, GoPro, Theranos, etc.
My point is that there must have been a noticeable step change in popularity level between PUBG and Fortnite such that it entered his consciousness and justified a business case study from him -- which in turn entered my consciousness. If "mainstream" isn't the right word to use to describe Fortnite's greater reach to non-gamers, I don't know what a substitute word would be.
Also, I know what the "floss dance" is and that it's in Fortnite. If PUBG or other video games have named dances, I don't even know of their existence.