Professional streaming gamers on twitch.tv - Part 2: Why is Fortnite Battle Royale such a successful game?
The reason that there are many successful professional streaming gamers that play Fortnite is that the game is extremely successful.
In this post, we will try to find out the causes of this success.
The first reason of the success of Fortnite Battle Royale is that it is free to play and is available on many platforms: Microsoft Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS and Nintendo Switch. It is rumored to be available on Android before the end of 2018.
[Unfortunately for me, the game is not available on Linux]
For example, to play on Windows, you just go to fortnite.com, get an account with Epic Games, just giving them your name, country and e-mail address, download the game and start to play.
As it is free to play, you can try the game without having to spend any money. This is a big advantage for teenagers that do not have a lot of money to spend.
The game is running on the Unreal game engine, developed by Epic Games, and they chose the level of details for the landscape and the avatars of the players, so that the game is fast. On a good laptop, the screen is redrawn 30 times per second (30 FPS). On a good desktop computer, it may go to 200 FPS and more. Here are two screenshots of the game:
Although you "eliminate" your opponents by killing them, the game is not gory: you never see any blood and when you are eliminated, your avatar just disappears. This is a big advantage for young children, as their parents will not fear that they will have nightmares about being killed. I saw that last week, when I demonstrated the game to my daughter Roseline who wanted to see if her young son Cyrus could be allowed to play the game.
Compared to other first-person shooter (FPS), the game has also a constructing element: from the material you can collect (wood, bricks and metal), you can build structures to protect you or to climb higher in the landscape.
You can play in teams of up to 4 players, with voice communication between the different players of the same team. So, the game may be played without being isolated. As I am writing this, my grandson Nathaneil (@naru-celier) is playing with two of his friends. And they started at 6:30 in the morning!
Although the game is free to play, it is also at the moment the most profitable game, with a revenue of several hundreds of thousands US dollars per month for Epic Games. The reason is that players are able to customize the appearance and the behavior of their avatar. They may even have several avatars. To do that, they need to buy "skins", backpacks, pickaxes and "emotes". Teenagers really like that. My grandson spends most of his money on Fortnite.
Here a screenshot of the player that eliminated me, with a skin that he has purchased:
Part of the game's success is also considered to be related to its impact on social media. By March 2018, Fortnite: Battle Royale became the most-viewed game on Twitch, exceeding the average-concurrent viewership numbers of League of Legends and Battlegrounds.
Wikipedia
All these reasons, and probably others that I missed, have made Fortnite Battle Royale one of the most successful video game, although it has been released only in September 2017, less than a year ago.
In the next post, we will try to find out how to become good at playing Fortnite.
Continue to Part 3
Part 1: Fortnite, the video game
