If Fortnite Were a Website, It Would Rival Reddit and Amazon (tomsguide.com) 112
Tom's Guide gives us some perspective on just how big of a cultural phenomenon the game Fortnite is: "if Fortnite were a website, it would be one of the top five in the United States." From the report: Take a quick look at Alexa's list of top U.S. websites, and you'll see Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Amazon in the top five. No surprises there. But as a quick Google Trends search reveals, Fortnite has become a hotter search term than Reddit. What some might see as a flash-in-the-pan gaming fad is actually outpacing one of the web's hottest destinations.
"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. "When you consider that Fortnite had more than 3 million concurrent players in February, I believe that if Fortnite were a website, it would be among the top five in the U.S., duking it out with Reddit and Amazon."
"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. "When you consider that Fortnite had more than 3 million concurrent players in February, I believe that if Fortnite were a website, it would be among the top five in the U.S., duking it out with Reddit and Amazon."
Game of the week (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah remember Pokémon GO? (Score:1)
That's barely a year old and remember how it was some national obsession? Now you don't hear shit about it anymore. Why? Because people move on. People will move on from Fortnite too.
Re: Yeah remember Pokémon GO? (Score:1)
You moved on. It still has a huge user base.
Reddit is a failing community, like /. is (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion, reddit is failing due to the same factors that sunk /. from being the premier technology discussion site into near total irrelevance today. In both cases we've seen abusive moderation of various forms create an intolerant 'circle-jerk' environment where original thoughts are quashed. This prevents new participants from staying very long, while the existing community ends up dwindling over time. Soon the community loses the momentum it once had, and thus begins to become less and less relevant each day. Even if the site is still operational some years later, like /. still is, it's a pathetic disgrace compared to what it once was, before abusive moderation created a rotten environment where adhering to ideology matters more than having intelligent discussion.
Re: Reddit is a failing community, like /. is (Score:1)
Slashdot is a pathetic disgrace, and yet you are still here.
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Re: It is popular today. (Score:1)
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Re:Game of the week (Score:5, Informative)
So you've been living under a rock. Fortnite is a free-to-play game, famous mostly for riding the "battle royale" wave created by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which is the other big game that you probably haven't heard about. Players parachute into a huge open map where they can fight other players and collect items. After a while, a shrinking "force field" appears. Anyone who stays or moves outside the shrinking area continuously takes damage. This forces the players to congregate and fight. Last player alive wins.
Re:Game of the week (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's like Bomberman on the SNES, but with more players?
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As an anonymous coward, how do we know you're not just blatantly advertising?
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Why do you care? The post was modded 'informative' so clearly people felt it contributed to the discussion.
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Considering it was purely informational (and did not gloss over the whole "riding the battle royale wave created by PUBG" part) and not an attempt to tantalize, why would you even think it was advertising? Is any description of a game now considered advertising?
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Technically speaking, "battle royale" was *popularized* by PUBG, but actually saw its initial interest from zombie survival games like H1Z1, Ark, etc. But yes the TLDR is there was a game last year (PUBG) which became really popular for battle royale gameplay and Fortnite was originally a wave-defense game that jumped on the bandwagon quickly with their own battle royale mode which wildly eclipsed the original game mode in popularity and ate PUBG's lunch.
Re:Game of the week (Score:4, Insightful)
OP's "point" is bullshit.
I had never heard of it either, until recently. As, it turns out, many of my friends had not either.
So what do they do? What did I do? Look it up on Google. As did many thousands of other people within a single week.
A peak in search activity does NOT translate into people actually going there, or playing the game.
That premise is just ridiculous.
Re:Game of the week (Score:5, Insightful)
So popular that gaming sites are being told to popularize it even more. Even slashdot is advertising for it. Such a popular game would never go anywhere unless we spam the world about its existence!
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So popular that gaming sites are being told to popularize it even more. Even slashdot is advertising for it. Such a popular game would never go anywhere unless we spam the world about its existence!
I hadn't heard of it so googled it. Most of the results had clickbait headlines "Fortnite is the biggest game on the planet right now" which leads me to believe this is some giant marketing campaign designed to hook people by sensational claims of popularity and FOMO and Slashdot is on the payroll. No doubt we'll see plenty more stories about it in the coming weeks.
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NPR ran a story about it [npr.org] on Saturday.
I suppose their job is to comment on cultural phenomena like this, but I could really do without pieces that amount to nothing more than an ad for some product.
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It's been going on for a while now. You may only have heard of it, but your kids have been playing it since late last year.
It's gotten to the point where my sister's school is in the midst of trying to come up with a better solution to keeping the kids from playing the mobile version of the game during class. The usual threats aren't working; they just go right back to it the next day. (And if they aren't playing about it, then it's all they want to talk about)
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But, if it wasn't this game, wouldn't kids just be playing some other game on their gadgets? Is there anything unique or interesting about this game? It seems like it's just another average shoot-em up.
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If threats don't work, you move onto punishments. Or is that crazy talk?
Oh, and when I went to school a few decades ago, videogames were all we wanted to talk about too. Kids tend to dive very deeply into new fads, and it tends to scare the shit out parents and school administrators.
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If threats don't work, you move onto punishments. Or is that crazy talk?
Yep, that's considered crazy talk now ... look up "restorative justice" ...
Metacritic scores suggest reviewers being paid off (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Metacritic scores suggest reviewers being paid (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're missing the history here though. Fortnite was originally not a 'battle royale' style game at all, and many of the early supporters (and people that put money into it) feel betrayed by its switch in focus. They very much drop the review scores.
Then there's the ongoing changes that any online game gets. A great online game may be changed by the developers to try and keep players engaged and interested, but invariably some of the original community will dislike the changes - the switch to Battle Royale being a prime example.
While those changes may result in new players with a positive view of the game, they're also likely to result in poor reviews from players who feel aggrieved at the perceived damage to their entertainment of choice.
It's one reason Steam now differentiates between overall and recent reviews.
TH,IHAW. DFTTYW. (Score:2)
So it's a bit like what happened to Gnome?
The solution's the same - create their own version. They could call it Forknite.
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That sort of divergence between review and user ratings is usually a pretty good indication
of business as usual in the game reviewing world.
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If it's so bad why is it so popular?
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Why would you search for "Reddit" though? (Score:1)
Everyone knows about it already. Not many people know about the latest games. If it is featured in articles (like this one) people will search for it to find out what it is.
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To be fair, I wouldn't want anybody browsing on my PC (and able to see my bookmarks) knowing I visited Reddit either.
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They'd just considered googling as quicker and more efficient.
Well, maybe it was.
Unless you use the bookmarks bar and keep it showing, typing a few letters and autocompleting your way there (whether autocompleted URL or autocompleted search term) quite likely is faster.
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A dumb fuck where I used to work always went to any website using Google search. His rationale was that the company (this was on his work computer) would keep track of what urls he was going to if he typed the url in directly.
If China Were a Website (Score:1)
It'd be in the top five! If fortnight were furniture store it'd be the largest! If fortnight were a website and named Facebook it'd be in the top!
Re: Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google.
We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
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We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
That was included in one of the proposals for universal document identifiers, before URLs and URIs took over. Instead of typing "http://ford.com", you would type "Ford Motor Co." and the two would be identical to the machine. Not a search, but a lookup.
That layer has never been developed, and the need was mostly obviated by the rise of search engines.
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Most browsers even hide the full URL as the site of this terrified many a folk.
I know that when I see a URL it scares the hell out of me. What is all that technobabble? If I don't understand it, it's clearly a liberal conspiracy designed to take my guns off me...
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Slashdotters: What is this 'Fortnite'? (Score:1)
I am too lazy to google (/. gives better answers anyway), and never heard of the game so far.
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It's just a pvp game with a slightly different twist. Any place you go to read about it will inevitably be so highly gushing in praise and amazement that you'll never know if it was a paid advertisement or a real review.
comment subject (Score:2)
didn't this flavor of the week get slashvertised two days ago?
Google trends is the wrong tool (Score:2)
Apparently Reddit is more popular than Amazon, yet the Google Trends for amazon vs reddit shows the opposite.
https://trends.google.com/tren... [google.com]
The number of people who google "youtube" is even higher.
The numbers for "google" are even higher again.
If Fortnight were a website, nobody would play it (Score:2)
What a stupid title... I know they are trying to get people to associated usage with something tangible, but comparing it to a website is silly. And the number of searches has no numerical purpose at all; apart from people who may have heard of it and searched it but will probably never play it.
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Watching "Pack A Puncher" play Fortnite on youtube (Score:2)
He's an 18 year old that doesn't annoy me. I like Fortnite but not that good at it, I guess I play Fortnite through him.
Fortnite is very popular at the moment, as are Fortnite streams on Twitch.tv and Youtube.
I started watching when he had some 300K youtube subscribers, now over 800K and pulling in 20K a day now.
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Find a better use for your time.
Watching may have a different meaning to you and I.
He streams a lot so have him playing all the time - in the backgound. I'm used to a tv playing while computing, but the commercials
over free tv (antenna) are obnoxious enough to find an alternative. But something has to be on TV for ambience.
But I've gathered enough tricks from him to help my son play some decent games. So it's been working pretty well.
wha? (Score:2)
"if Fortnite were a website, it would be one of the top five in the United States."
But as a quick Google Trends search reveals, Fortnite has become a hotter search term than Reddit.
Er ... the one thing does not follow from the other. At all.
Maybe everybody is just searching to see what the heck all this astroturfing is talking about?
What did Pokemon Go peak at 2 years ago? (Score:2)
For that matter, never having played it it sounds like Fortnite is similar to what you find on many Minecraft servers (Factions, Survival with PvP), but built into the game and as the default instead of something you need to be shown how to get to. Basically they loo
Teabagging (Score:1)
Uh, right (Score:2)
If I were a potato, I would be a world record potato. What relevance is that to anything, since I'm (probably) not a potato. And Fortnite is not a website.