Editorial: Fortnite does it right

Fortnite does it right

          If you’ve been paying attention to the gaming community over the past few months, you’ve surely noticed that Fortnite has taken the world by storm. And why wouldn’t it? Despite still being in Early Access the game feels like PUBG fully realized, without the graphical and gameplay errors that plague that game.

          While I’m not a huge fan of the Battle Royale concept as a whole (a 1 in 100 chance of winning just doesn’t appeal to me), I can definitely see how Fortnite managed to become the early king of the gaming ring this year, as well as how it managed to get away with stuff like microtransactions and the like.

          First and foremost: Fortnite has quickly become the poster boy for Free to Play gaming. While you can buy cosmetic stuff with real money, you never have to drop a dime on the game if you don’t want to. In a world with games like Battlefront II costing $79.99 to get basically the starter pack with the microtransactions to get the real stuff waiting inside, Fortnite decided to prove once and for all that you can still make a good game that garners massive popularity while having said microtransactions inside.

          The only cost? The game has to be free to play.

          I feel that this is partially why Fortnite has exploded in popularity so massively. You don’t need to drop a single cent to give it a try. All you need is some empty space on your hard drive and the game is yours to play. If you don’t like it, you uninstall it and you don’t need to give it a second thought. But if you do like it there are a bunch of options to give back to the developers who made this game by buying some of the bonus cosmetic stuff they have available.

          At the end of the day it’s a win-win. The people playing the game don’t have to fork over an $80 shell price just to have access to the base game, instead getting one they can try at their leisure and forget about quickly if it doesn’t appeal to them. And if the game turns out to be good and garner itself a fanbase the developers will still garner a profit from microtransaction sales.

          Of course, for companies like EA and Activision there can never be enough profit, and that’s how stuff like Star Wars Battlefront II and Destiny 2 happen.

          But here’s the good news: Fortnite has quickly emerged as one of, if not the most popular online multiplayer game in the wake of Overwatch. While PUBG certainly garnered some attention last year, once this fancy new kid on the block showed up boasting about how it could actually run on something less than a supercomputer, wasn’t plagued by hackers from foreign countries, and, best of all, was free, heads quickly began to turn. It even reached a point where Drake, perhaps one of today’s biggest musical superstars, was playing it. That’s some damn nice free advertising if Drake of all people says your game is good.

          While I do have my doubts that this’ll actually happen, I would very much like to see Triple-A publishers try to replicate Fortnite’s success the same way they tried to replicate Overwatch’s success by making 2017 the Year of the Loot Box. But I think there’s only one way to take down Fortnite, and that’s by doing it one better. Thing is, there’s no way anyone’s going to prefer a $70 knockoff of the game to the $0 real McCoy, so if they want to throw their hat in the ring of Battle Royale they’ll have to learn to dance like Fortnite does.