> What this means is that, unlike so many other gaming trends, Fortnite truly seems like it's here to stay. According to Google searches, Fortnite has a ways to go to reach the staggering highs of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game that became a huge phenomenon throughout the summer of 2016.
The argument is that Fortnite is not a fad, and then it's immediately compared to one of the biggest gaming fads in recent memory? And it isn't quite as popular as that fad? Okay.
> “More people in the U.S. are searching for ‘Fortnite’ on Google than they are for ‘Reddit’ and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company.
What a genius comparison! Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
> Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
It seems to me that googling for a popular site like reddit is actually pretty common. A couple of reasons:
1. Because google is often much better at returning relevant results for site:<site>.com <query> than searching for <query> in the site's search engine. I would think this to be the case even more so for types of sites like reddit simply because of such high total post / word count. In fact, brand recognition would seem to be more of a reason for people to google it. E.g. If you want to read a wikipedia article on some topic, you normally wouldn't visit wikipedia.org first to use its search, you'd google "wikipedia <topic>" or "site:wikipedia.org <topic>".
2. To avoid hitting enter after a typo and ending up on some malware site <domain with typo>.com.
Do people even use the site:reddit.com google query? If I want to search for something on reddit, I just search “something reddit” and the results are nearly always sufficient.
Yes. I use it for comment searching, you'd be surprised how useful it is for miscellaneous subject research. Then again I always try to use operators when applicable.
Anecdotally, the process to get to Facebook for many members of my family is to Google "f" or "facebook". They know how to go directly there but for whatever reason prefer Googling it. I have heard the same from friends about their (typically older) family too.
At this point I would assume most people who use Facebook routinely type 'f' in the address/search bar and it autocompletes immediately to the full Facebook URL and they just hit enter. Trying to get Chrome to search for facebook instead of going to facebook.com takes extra effort.
Yeah, the only way to search reddit and actually get what you are looking for is through Google. I don't understand why the website's search is so bad.
This article is idiotic. The assertion seems to be based entirely off Google Trends and "supported" by a quote from someone with a professional relationship to the author that just says they "believe" it might be true.
Google Trends is almost completely meaningless for both judging the popularity of a game, and the popularity of sites like reddit or Amazon.
Games follow a trendline like te^-rt where t is time and r dependent on the game. The reason is simple. When a person learns of some piece of content (game, meme, whatever) there is some probability they share it with one or more people. If on average each person exposed shares with more than one person then you get an exponential explosion (aka virality). But sharing content with people who have already seen it is redundant. Eventually the average new people shared with per person exposed becomes less than one and the exponential growth becomes exponential decay. Content where r is large explode quickly and die quickly (blue/black dress). Content where r is just barely greater than 0 have a slow rise and slow decline.
The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft. The reason is that the r value is small enough that population growth during the games lifetime is non-negligible.
Minecraft is Lego-style self-directed play, completely unlike most video games.
If you watch, say the Direwolf20 series on Age Of Engineering, he ends up building this huge space station to win. But, that space station was his idea, not a requirement, my play of AoE has a tiny airless platform with a warp drive in it for space exploration and my main base was in the open air in a parallel universe where it never rains. He spends lots of time building structures in low gravity wearing a jetpack, I spent more fencing off wildlife. This wasn't a choice explicitly offered in the game, just a consequence of different people with the same infinite box of Lego bricks building a different layout. The very different experiences mean essentially infinite replay value.
"Random" sandbox elements became very popular in video games, but QA teams militate against building anything like Minecraft where you just can't test because there's a combinatorial explosion of interactions. Instead most games have a handful of set pieces with inconsequential random elements.
But that means even if nobody else's game of Shadow of Mordor is exactly the same, they're so similar as to preclude most interest in replaying. Which makes good economic sense, sell the player a new one every year. But you don't become a phenomenon like Minecraft that way.
These are fair points. Mario maker IMO wouldn't be a phenomena without the original Mario so I don't consider it a counter example. But DOTA is fair enough. I forgot that one.
I would say that franchising/sequels reflect the fact that if you have content which is just barely sub-viral you can pump money into marketing to get virality to get more money. Basically a controlled fission reaction instead of an explosion.
I'm sort of confused by what these games bring to the table that is novel and such a revolutionary improvement over what came before. My FPS playing days are long over, but battle royale games seem like super beefy Counter Strike or Quake Arena servers, to my ignorant eyes. I'm pretty sure 100+ player Quake World games would have been awesome, if the hardware and network connections of the time could have kept up.
A good player (say, Ninja) routinely plays an entire 20 minute game, eliminating maybe a dozen or so other players themselves out of the roughly 100 starting. So for them this 20 minutes is spent doing what they enjoy, stalking and killing their opponents. On a run, Ninja might do this three times in an hour. A whole hour of being awesome.
A bad player like me usually is eliminated much earlier in the game, maybe they spend that time frantically hiding from superior players, or they lay traps, or the stay on the fringes of the island away from contact, sooner or later though they get killed... and then they immediately jump into a _different game_ and start over. In an hour they might play 10 games, or even thirty if they're very, very bad or just love starting in the most conflicted zones and often die in the opening seconds.
The rest of the game design exists to reinforce this basic idea, for example there's a "zone" or "storm" mechanism forcing players into a gradually smaller (but random) part of the map as the game progresses to keep them in conflict so that they get eliminated. Players deliberately aren't named while they're alive, you are sniping some chick in a rabbit suit, not LiverpoolFCFan, and she won't be back in the same game, so you don't learn anything re-usable.
The result of this trick of perspective is that more people are having fun, not just the most skilled players.
I would highly doubt they were larger within the time frame they started. Even though Twitch (Justin.tv) started back then, esports and watching video games were nowhere near as popular as they are today.
I would argue that Twitch has had a really strong role in making battle royale games popular -- they're extremely fun to watch in comparison to MOBAs which I'm starting to realize are fairly dull in the beginning but the anticipation of what happens mid-game to late game makes it exciting.
You know what else was a fad...I mean cultural phenomenon? The Wii.
This is great for gaming. Fortnite has driven twitch viewers to crazy new heights and while most of them will never come back (check wii sales against the most popular game franchises on the Wii’s sales) some percentage will have found their new thing and the ecosystem will be stronger for having weathered the crashing wave.
I'd also say it's not a fad if it was superseded like this. It's not that the wii lost favor, it's generation became out of date, and nintendo was betting on people buying it's new product.
Fads usually have an illogical, social reason for their popularity, not a direct spec to spec comparison (Playstation pro beats the wii in popularity at this time (2018)- well duh!)
The wii was popular for many reasons, and I'm sure it became "popular" to buy one, but it didn't lose to a social hype dying down, it lost to a new generation of consoles (and it's successor didn't do well in comparison to those)
PUBG is a terrible implementation with textures and assets purchased off the unreal store. PUBG piggybacked off the popularity of H1Z1 and took off because it was slightly better. Fortnite, although cartoony, is by large and far the most stable and most competitive battle Royale out there. Epic's update pipeline and developer blogs are phenomenal, especially compared to Bluehole. PUBG performs worse in it's current state than when it did pre-release.
H1Z1 Battle Royale mode was licensed from PUBG creator.
I agree PUBG implementation is terrible, but nonetheless the credit is due where it's due. Brendan Greene started it, and PUBG trails Fornite only slightly despite costing $30.
And H1Z1 was a "rip-off" of DayZ. And DayZ is what made battle royal popular (I won't go as far as to say invented it, as I'm sure BR must have existed in other games before it).
It's hard to understand why DayZ did not cease this market opportunity, but I guess they are too buzzy actually making a good simulator. Yes, simulator, DayZ is not a game, it's a zombie Apocalypse simulator. And that's what makes DayZ so unique. I can't wait until DayZ gets their first release (it has been in alpha for several years, and will soon hit beta) and it will have game-play like the walking dead tv series, with zombie hordes, state of the art gun fighting, weather, hiking, zombie - simulation, with decent graphics and gameplay. The early days of DayZ (Arma 2 mod) was the best game experience I've ever had in my life, and I've been a pretty hard core gamer.
PUBG is almost exactly like its predecessors, so I don't know how you can level "shameless clone" at Fortnite that has the whole building mechanic.
That was a big risk compared to PUBG's conservative and incremental iteration on the existing genre.
Though these Fortnite vs PUBG arguments sure sound like the Xbox vs PS3 forum debates back in the day... I was always thankful that I didn't encounter them on HN.
Which predecessor is PUBG exactly like? PUBG is the originator of the Battle Royale type, unless you count the Japanese movie Battle Royale as a predecessor.
Player Unknown grew to fame originally as a modder who created Battle Royale modes for other games, and then used that experience/name recognition to launch his own game. If PUBG was the first Battle Royale mode, Player Unknown wouldn't have been famous and it would have just been Battlegrounds.
I guess I'm using PUBG/Brendan Greene/PlayerUnknown interchangeably. In spirit PUBG is the successor of the mods he created, the game engines that happened to host it were vessels. So PUBG the game is simply a continuation of the original modes he created. It's also currently the most popular, outside of Fortnite, so I consider it the originator.
there were dozens of battleroyale type games that predate PUBG with near identical looting + random circle collapsing inward mechanics, most floundered.
I'm not sure what the other ones were, but for the popularly referenced Battle Royale modes in H1Z1 and DayZ, they originated from mods by the PUBG creator.
That being said, both the games you reference, their Battle Royale mode was actually made by the creator of PUBG:
> Brendan Greene, also known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, is the creator of the Battle Royale mod that started in the DayZ mod for Arma 2. Recently, Battle Royale has been licensed by SOE and made an official game mode in H1Z1
H1Z1 and DayZ were clearly not in any way inspired by the Japanese movie "Battle Royal", which PUBG was, and which Fornite literally named itself after.
That being said, both the games you reference, their Battle Royale mode was actually made by the creator of PUBG:
> Brendan Greene, also known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, is the creator of the Battle Royale mod that started in the DayZ mod for Arma 2. Recently, Battle Royale has been licensed by SOE and made an official game mode in H1Z1
You're being overly pedantic. They are referring to the BR modes in those games, and they are effectively clones and inspired by the movie Battle Royal.
Yes I'm referring to the BR modes in those games, and they were all from the same creator / licensed from the PUBG creator.
They all were inspired by the movie Battle Royale, but that was a movie, not a game. If movie <-> games were indicators of mutual success that would be a first.
Grandparent was suggesting that PUBG copied off of H1N1/DayZ, justifying Fortnite copying PUBG. While sony cloned PUBG, they licensed it, whereas Fornite didn't. But they were not originally Battle Royale games and the Battle Royale modes came from the creator of PUBG.
> They are referring to the BR modes in those games, and they are effectively clones and inspired by the movie Battle Royal.
I don't get what you're saying here. I mentioned the movie Battle Royale, not them. And predecessor games' battle royale modes grandparent suggested PUBG cloned from were made by the PUBG creator. I'm not sure what I said really counts as "pedantic" so much as the grandparent completely misrepresenting facts.
> What this means is that, unlike so many other gaming trends, Fortnite truly seems like it's here to stay. According to Google searches, Fortnite has a ways to go to reach the staggering highs of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game that became a huge phenomenon throughout the summer of 2016.
The argument is that Fortnite is not a fad, and then it's immediately compared to one of the biggest gaming fads in recent memory? And it isn't quite as popular as that fad? Okay.
> “More people in the U.S. are searching for ‘Fortnite’ on Google than they are for ‘Reddit’ and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company.
What a genius comparison! Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.