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Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

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Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of games have had elimination modes for a long time. This is really just an evolution of that adding the mechanic of the map edges closing in.

Elimination mode is more generic. The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

>The battle royale subgenre started with the Minecraft hunger game mode, and grew more popular by H1Z1: King of the Hill, and then by PUBG.

Minecraft had nothing to do with it. PU was inspired by the Battle Royale novel/movie and The Running Man. He forked the Day Z ARMA2 mod and made DayZ: Battle Royale, and that predates H1Z1 KotH by 3 years.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#172
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a point of contention recently, the question of who created battle royale. Perhaps Greene is responsible for the modern iteration of it, but the last-man-standing concept has been around in gaming since Bomberman in 1983. And the concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in…

You are just nit picking. He is talking about the closing circle game mechanics. Yes simple but yet genius.

lookup H1Z1

also this concept was a minecraft mod called hunger games before that even

PUBG succeeded and vastly popularized the BR genre but it definitely didn't invent it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game#Early_games...

  While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year,[18][19] and is considered the defining game of the genre.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad, but arena shooters have been dying as a category ever since around UT3. I'm hopeful they'll make a resurgence in the future.

I thought Quake Champions would be the best chance for the genre to be revived. With how popular LoL and DotA and Overwatch are, it seemed like a mix of the traditional arena shooter with special abilities/spells would be a good way to attract that audience. It hasn't. Maybe because Bethesda's efforts still lean too heavily on traditional Quake and they're unwilling to really embrace the RPG/ability aspect of MOBAs.…

There's a lot of game design baggage that big IP titles just can't resist including, I'd expect an arena revival to come from an indie shop trying new things and importantly leaving out a lot of other things.

I wouldn't mind seeing Tribes sledding in more stuff though.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lead designer on PUBG, Brendan Greene, had previously made a Battle Royale Arma 2 mod.

I think Brendan’s mod came out ~2015 and Sa-Matras came out around 2013 which, itself is an adaptation of another mod. Please correct me if I am wrong. Not to say any of this is really new or original. As I recall there is an Arma 2 wasteland mod that came out before Arma 3: https://forums.bohemia.net/forums/topic/134450-arma2ru-waste...

Brendan's original mod was a fork of DayZ for Arma2 and came out roughly the same time as the Arma2 wasteland mod.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#175
post #6

What does HN people think on the whole idea of stealing concept from PUBG? I am kind of divided on this topic.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think it was PUBG that came up with the battle royal concept. I believe H1Z1 had battle royal mode before PUBG existed.

H1Z1's BR mod was a copy of the fork of the Arma 2 DayZ mod... which was done by the creator of PUBG.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#176
post #4

Hopefully this shows others that you can make successful games without pay to win mechanics.

> Hopefully this shows others that you can make successful games without pay to win mechanics. Overwatch also has zero pay-to-win mechanics.

I want to like overwatch, I really do, but on my Ubuntu system with an AMD RX 550, it just lags, and lags, and lags. The other modes all work fine. I'm hoping it just needs some updates..

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#177
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that move is definitely nice for developers, but it's still self-serving. They're in an uphill battle against steam's moat, and increasing rates is a way of attracting more developers.

The UE Marketplace is targeted at developers only and sells assets and such for use in UE games. I was not aware that Steam is competing in that area at all and a cursory search didn't yield any such results. Of course other marketplaces selling assets exist, but I am not aware that one has a dominant market position that Epic are trying hard to surpass. Please do let me know if that is, in fact, the case. Or are you…

They are talking about the Steam-competing store Epic launched recently:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/

It's pretty empty now but I'll be shocked if it doesn't have thousands of games within the next 3 years.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think it was PUBG that came up with the battle royal concept. I believe H1Z1 had battle royal mode before PUBG existed.

A Minecraft mod seems to get credit for being the first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game

Quake 3 Arena had a last-man-standing mod. I don't recall the shrinking arena aspect, though.

Re: Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018

#180
post #40
post #10

> Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year What does this even mean? Net income? Top line gross profit (meaning minus COGS), which is normally like 80% GM for heavily software enabled businesses? Ugh, tech reporters.

Yes, gross profit is usually understood as revenue minus cogs. But it doesn't seem like the reporter is using it correctly here.

I'm about 63%* sure the reporter is referring to revenue.

* made up number

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