> Epic is absolutely SWIMMING in money thanks to what was essentially a weekend project by two of their engineers.

Are you talking about Fortnite in general, or the Battle Royale mode?

The weird thing is that my impression is that Fortnite was talked about for awhile as this Horde-mode construction game, sort of like minecraft meets L4D. Then the BR F2P mode was added and the whole thing blew up.

>Then the BR (F2P) mode was added and the whole thing blew up.

Summary of video games in the last 5 years.

5 years? PUBG is probably the first massively successful battle royale game and it's not been 2 years yet.

H1Z1/Rust/etc are all a continuous survivalist game and other games were mostly mods.

I'm personally excited to see where Activision or EA take the genre (Blizzard too but I don't see that happening anytime soon).

Well, pivot while you can...

I always felt bad for the devs of the actual Fortnite game. Its clear lots of time and resources were poured into what was actually a pretty good horde style survival/crafting game, then the little BR offshoot came along and now whenever someone says "Fortnite" I just assume they mean BR because no one actually plays the survival game.

I guess they can't complain about the success but it would have to feel at least a little bit demoralizing.

Pretty fleshed-out, pretty feature-rich, pretty long developed - but not pretty good. If it was pretty good we would be talking about the fort construction mode in PUBG now.

Same with Warcraft 3 and DOTA right?

Wasn't Dota a mod? Like, the guy who made it had the intention to make this game (with the help of WC3)

Custom map technically, although the WC3 map editor let you write custom code so the line is kind of blurry.

Sure.

I just had the impression DOTA was made by some guy who wanted to make something like DOTA and Fortnite was made by some people who wanted to make some mix of L4D and Minecraft, but pivoted to doing something like PUBG instead.

lol, serendipity.

As far as I know the regular mode is not free to play.

I only tried it because it was a free alternative to PUBG

The regular mode will be F2P, it's just currently in the "founder's pack" stage of F2P games.

I find Fortnite BR really special - greater than the sum of its parts. I'm an avid gamer who does not like FPS as a rule, but I'm also always looking for one I'd enjoy. BR is the first FPS I've been delighted by since Quake 3.

Fortnite is 3rd-person though, maybe you meant shooters in general?

Is there a link to where I could see a recording of the Ninja, Kim Dotcom & Drake game by any chance? Or a link to a stream recording? Thanks so much! Had no idea Fortnite has become that big. It always seemed too "cartoony" for me (as compared to PUBG).

Just search ninja's youtube, it should come up to the top.

Cartoony makes it fun in a way that realistic graphics based games just can't match because of the aesthetic. It begs a silly-ness to elements that make it enjoyable and Epic can refresh at will (player skins for St. Pattys day, hidden Llama's on the map, Chinese new year theme, etc.)

Twitch VODs are automatically deleted after a couple of days, so either check it out now at https://twitch.tv/ninja (with the chat archive intact) or watch the recap on his YouTube channel.

Travis Scott was the other rapper playing with them. Juju Smith-Schuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers also joined them for a while.

Wasn't Fortnite just a quick clone of PUBG once they saw it taking off?

Sort of, but Epic Games seem to actually know how to program. PUBG, not unlike it's former competitor H1Z1, has languished with a terrible code base whose technical debt seems to have kept PUBG from ever really fixing things. The netcode is bad, the game runs AWFUL on all setups (Twitch streamers with state of the art computers were forced to play on low settings while streaming on the same computer), and there seem to be some particular performance issues with AMD CPUs.

Cheating is also a major issue.

So it was a clone, but basically a better one than the original.

Fortnite is the first survivor game that just works.

I felt bad for PUBG first, but PUBG is still such a huge mess, I do have to give it to Epic for building an extremely solid game that runs well and isn't rife with cheaters.

Shame about the business model, though.

Helps when you have inside knowledge of how the every part of the engine works though.

This where the quotes around "benevolence" would come in. I'm a total fanboy for PUBG, so take this with a grain of salt, I totally understand why Bluehole threatened to sue when Fortnite released its PUBG copy. Now PUBG is in-and-of itself a copy of a copy (turtles all the way...) of a mod, so a lot of people balked at this.

PUBG had made quite a bit of money for Epic, through the UE4 licencing fees. This is akin to Amazon noticing how much money you made them through AWS and deciding to offer a free (arguably better, although I've never played more than 5 minutes of Fortnite, too much cartoon!) version of your product.

TBH, that analogy may be a bit unfair, but Epic is no saint.

Amazon does that with games in that they're offering the lumberyard game engine (a fork of crytek) for free as long as you use AWS.

Amazon ALSO makes Amazon basics branded knock off of the popular physical items in store. There's an article about an aluminum laptop stand you might be able to Google for.

Fortnite BR is. The Fortnite game is not.