Fortnite is the Future of Gaming

There’s been a lot of talk lately about where the industry goes from here. It’s is in a bad place. Games that are too big to fail are failing. Releases are becoming fewer, and developers are playing it absolutely safe. And yet the answer is right under our noses: Fortnite.

Now, I can’t say that I love this future. But every so often the topic of Fortnite will come up amongst myself and colleagues and although it’s not our cup of tea one thing is certain: Epic are doing it right.

Because while we’ve been talking about how consoles survive the coming 15 years, Epic has turned a battle royale shooter into a platform of its own. It has its own games and mini-games, it has its own exclusive content, and it’s only getting bigger. More worrying than that, it doesn’t have any competition.

Fortnite doesn’t rely on having a specific device. It doesn’t even rely on you paying £70 upfront. It offers something for everybody without needing subscriptions, peripherals or anything else. It’s very simple: play the game, buy the crap. And yes, it’s crap.

While the big boys scratch their heads over how to make $300m (and rising) blockbusters make any kind of financial sense, Epic are supposedly releasing skins based on Gargoyles. And they’ll  likely make more money from that than the actual Gargoyles game released last year ever did. That’s to tie into D23, the Disney event currently happening. And as Fortnite has proven time and time again, there’s no shortage of events and companies with which to team up. That’s how they ended up with the Cybertruck in there, a piece of DLC which hilariously failed to run as expected.

Fortnite: The Future?

There is only room for a few of these types of experiences. The free-to-play market has well and truly proven this over the last decade. The biggest games stay the biggest games. Everything else is a flash in the pan, and very rarely even that. If you make a free-to-play game in the hopes of stealing some attention from Call of Duty or Rocket League, you are going to fail.

We can already see this move towards a Game As A Platform future. Call of Duty is just Call of Duty now. Assassin’s Creed has a hub on the horizon too. But whereas Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed will dilute their identities at their own risk, Fortnite isn’t anything. Fortnite can be everything. They moved quickly enough, and were fluid enough to prove that time and time again. And it’s netting them a huge amount of success.

As I said at the top of this article, this isn’t the future I want. I don’t want games to be a platform. Then again, I don’t want games to be blockbusters either.  Games don’t do stories as well as films or books, and yet here we are.

The future of the industry is difficult to work out. Where do we go from here, when so much makes so little sense? It’s hard to argue that at a time when single player games struggle to make a splash, Fortnite is creating the model for what may come.