'Fortnite' Creator Sees Epic Games Becoming as Big as Facebook, Google (variety.com) 84
The company behind "Fortnite" wants to become the next Facebook or Google, said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. The idea isn't much of a stretch. From a report: While "Fortnite" began life as a relatively mundane game it continues to evolve, first by adding a battle royale mode, and then by leaning on the game's massive install base to turn the title into something more akin to a social platform that can host concerts, tell stories, and inspire creativity. Sweeney points to the game's popularity as a "mass-market streaming phenomenon," the moment when "Fortnite" player teamed up with musician Drake in-game, and when the game played host to about 10 million people in a live, in-game Marshmello concert. "We feel the game industry is changing in some major ways," he said. "'Fortnite' is a harbinger of things to come. It's a massive number of people all playing together, interacting together, not just playing but socializing."
"In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers, they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate." Flush with a relatively recent $1.25 billion investment from a half-dozen investment firms and the steady flow of cash from both "Fortnite" and Epic Game's Unreal game engine, Sweeney has big plans for the company.
"In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers, they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate." Flush with a relatively recent $1.25 billion investment from a half-dozen investment firms and the steady flow of cash from both "Fortnite" and Epic Game's Unreal game engine, Sweeney has big plans for the company.
Doubtful (Score:4, Insightful)
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And here we are, with the Angry Birds 2 movie trailer dropping a few days ago...
Fortnite way more traction than Angry Birds (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook is a social hub for most people.
That is not true anymore, especially for younger people.
Fortnite has had huge gains in adoption, and has gone way beyond where Angry Birds was in terms of cultural impact - they are even attending concerts in Fortnite now, and lots of people watch streamers play which was never the case with Angry Birds. So it too is a kind of social community, especially the streams...
Re:Fortnite way more traction than Angry Birds (Score:4, Informative)
they are even attending concerts in Fortnite now,
I remember when SecondLife was hosting concerts and business meetings.
and lots of people watch streamers play
That's mainly good for Twitch, not Fortnite.
Re:Fortnite way more traction than Angry Birds (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortnite has had huge gains in adoption, and has gone way beyond where Angry Birds was in terms of cultural impact - they are even attending concerts in Fortnite now, and lots of people watch streamers play which was never the case with Angry Birds. So it too is a kind of social community, especially the streams...
Minecraft is probably a better comparison, and I don't see Fortnite having close to the same lasting appeal or impact. It's a stylish, but limited game that still revolves around guns as much as anything.
Doesn't really revolve around guns though (Score:2)
Minecraft is probably a better comparison, and I don't see Fortnite having close to the same lasting appeal or impact. It's a stylish, but limited game that still revolves around guns as much as anything.
You are selling Fortnite too short, Fornite is a lot more than a gun game. Even just the popularity of the dancing aspect should provide an indication about that... it's not as much about building as Micecraft, but for a lot of people Fortnite is about building as well.
The thing that Fortnite has going for
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Even just the popularity of the dancing aspect should provide an indication about that...
Have you played any MMOs in the last decade or so? Dancing in multiplayer games is pretty old news [youtube.com]. Hell, even the dance Epic got sued for has been seen in other games before. It's just that Fortnite is the hot new thing, so everyone who hasn't been paying close attention to the gaming scene for the past few decades thinks they're seeing this phenomenon for the first time. Really, it's all been done before, just in slightly different formats, and naturally, not with the sheer numbers, since the videogam
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One of the most anticipated upcoming RPGs on the PC, the antitode to the depression set from Fallout 76, is to become an "exclusive" of Epic Games (for one year). Major backlash. The consoles are where you go for the silliness of exclusives, introducing this to PCs will not go well. I predict a lot of people will just wait; we already wait for prices to drop from their astronomical release apex, so just wait a little bit longer to express our opinion.
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I doubt it too, but I can't fault them for thinking big.
Their one innovation is that they figure out the market is ripe for a little disruption. Online software distribution services are mature now and Epic thinks they can offer companies a bigger cut of the revenue than Steam or similar will give them. - And they may not be wrong about that.
They've got big war chest with their hit Fortnite and they're able to offer other companies sweet deals for exclusives that executives can't resist.
Of course it takes m
Second Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like this might be a repeat of history
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To bad the "game" Fortnite has already been eclipsed by Apex Legends ... so I guess he's hoping it can morph into something else that can make money.
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No it hasn't. Apex Legends paid prominent streamers millions of dollars [oneangrygamer.net] to promote the game, which is the only reason it passed Fortnite during its debut week. Now we're a month later and it's back down to 5-10th place on Twitch, depending on when you look.
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So does Tim Sweeney think he's going to plaster ads and datamine user information like Facebook?
Having personally met and talked with the guy once I respected him more than that.
Let Epic Games get big... (Score:1)
If one hasn't noticed, PUBG, Fortnite, and Apex Legends have vacuumed up the bottom tier of the gaming playerbase. Everything from League of Legends to Warframe seems to have better, more cooperative, less whiny players now.
Thank you Epic Games. Keep the kiddies and make money from them. You do a service to the entire gaming community by doing so.
Is ... is this the Facebook killer app? (Score:1)
I'm old enough to be out of touch, so I guess anything is possible.
Re:Is ... is this the Facebook killer app? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm old, and I play Fortnite frequently. The real concern with Fortnite is that people will spend much of the time they used to spend on other apps playing Fortnite instead, not about it doing what the other apps do. The CEO of Netflix recently said something about being more concerned with competition from Fortnite than with other streaming services, but he was talking about it stealing attention.
EGS (Score:4, Informative)
Epic Game Store is shit though.
No email authentication (pretty basic, no?) so people can sign up with your email address. Near-constant friend request spam (from bots/scammers). No social 'facilities' beyond basic friends list and basic chat. It's not a social network, it's just a platform where people can meet in a game and maybe get together on a proper social network elsewhere.
Also, fuck Epic for their exclusivity deals on their shitty platform.
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Related (since Steam recommends 2FA it came to me)... Epic needs to aim to increase their features to be on-par with Steam, before they shift their goals to Facebook/Google status.
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But wait, there's more!
For me, the client was using 8x more bandwidth than my pathetic internet connection was even capable of. I can only assume it was pounding my router trying to connect instead of having some sensible method of downloading. Needless to say, internet was impossible to use for anything else. I had to download a traffic shaping program from my motherboard manufacturer's website and throttle it to get things under control. And even at half my connection's bandwidth, it still downloaded
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Scratching the surface much?
No cloud saves
No user profiles
No review system
No mod distribution
No groups
No item trading (for better or worse)
No account sharing
No streaming between devices
No broadcasting
No universal screenshotting
Metro Exodous is still on my wishlist on steam. I'm happy to pay for it but until it's available on Steam I guess I'll just have to rely on the guys from CPY who helped make the game less exclusive to the Epic Shitshow.
Wow, someone has a very high opinion of themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
You've had one hit game. You're not a cultural revolution, snowflake.
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See, this is what happens when you let people drink too much at the Epic Games Casual Friday Fun Party.
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You probably don't know this. Epic have had more than just one hit game.
First released game appeared in 1992 as Epic (and one before that in 1991 with another company name) I really dare you to put out a full blown release of a game software product running on just one platform, even with today's free tools and git-ware. It takes a lot more time than you can imagine.
In Those 30 years, the tiny company Epic managed to outsmart Id, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Valve, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take2, V
Huh? (Score:1)
Do racist 12 year olds have that much influence on household purchases? FB and Google make money off their ad networks. I can just see trying to buy ads on Epic Game's network looking like this:
Age demographic:
12 Year Old Kids
12 Year Old Kids
12 Year Old Kids
Income:
Has parents CC info
Has Parent-By-Proxy parents
Has stolen CC info from friend's parents
Location:
Living with parents, duh
Platform:
Xbox
Playstation
Nintendo
PC - just kidding kids don't use PCs, pick something else.
Bitcoin of gaming (Score:3)
Of course you'll be as big (Score:4, Interesting)
When you're doing all that data slurping through the rootkit that is Easy Anti-Cheat and such.
The Chinese must love you for that, given you're already 40-ish percent owned by Tencent.
VR online world, a la Ready Player One (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people in the other comments seem to have not understood what is being suggested here.
The summary talks about a virtual concert that was held with 10 million attendees, using the Fortnite game engine. They're not saying Fortnite the game is going to be this new social thing, they're saying that Fortnite's engine and existing player base is the basis for a new social platform.
If they swing it right, this could be the first online VR world that gets some semblance of mass adoption. It won't be quite like what is pictured in Ready Player One but that's the direction they're heading in.
I think given their existing fanbase and technology they're in a better position to achieve this than any of the other online behemoths. The only question is whether VR tech is good enough / cheap enough to achieve this, or if it's still not quite ready for prime time. Because if they can't use VR then this is likely to go the way that Second Life did - gain a respectable following and some mainstream mindshare, but eventually peter out.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are all working on online game streaming services - Google and Apple have announced Stadia and Arcade and Microsoft and Amazon are going to announce theirs later this year. Nintendo and Sony appear to be missing. But what Epic are suggesting here is a different pivot that looks like it is ahead of the competition, which suggests they're ahead of the curve and therefore could rapidly hoover up a new market before anyone else gets a look-in, the way Amazon did with their cloud offering and Netflix did with online streaming.
Delusions of Grandeur (Score:3)
Uh - huh
If I'm not mistaken, this is exactly what Second Life* was supposed to provide ?
( and look where it is today )
*or any MMORPG for that matter
A decade from now if you're still pulling in the big $$$ and keeping your user base ( Think Blizzard with WoW ) then we can start talking about how amazing you think you are. ( I'm certainly no WoW fan, but the $$$ Blizzard has made from the franchise is the aspiration of what every game developer hopes to create )
Sweeney (Score:3)
This guy was a murderous barber, wasn't he?
Really? (Score:2)
The problem with that idea is that what may be a hit today may not be a hit tomorrow. Gamers eventually get bored of an idea and move on to the next.
Remember when zombie games were the rage, or the endless World War 2 games? Yes they're still here today, but they certainly arent as big as they once were, which was boiling hot, a point where Fortnite currently is today in its oversaturated Battle Royale genre market, which, by the way, is simply a tweak on the Death Match genre that John Romero coined as
Hubris before the fall ... (Score:1)
... as lost of reddit gamers HATE epic store and boycott them.
Need some more games thou (Score:2)
What was the last thing they made before that? Gears of War?
That series is trash. Terrible characters. Terrible story. Boring characters. Boring design. Boring environments.
Shotgun is quite fun thou.