Are Fortnite's Constant Updates a help or a hindrance?

CallumA
CallumA
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

Fornite. You’ve heard about it, you’ve probably seen it and 0.0173611111% of the population plays it (which by the way, is a lot), equating roughly to the population of Mexico. That was all a recap in case you forgot how big Fortnite was. And a year on from its release it still is HUGE (it’s so big I put huge in capital letters) and to justify that, all the money that Epic Games have earned from this Phenomenon so far, could solve a rather large portion of the worlds poverty crisis. But a simple game without any changes for a year would certainly not last as long as Fortnite because Fortnite, ingeniously has ‘constant free updates’, which many game developers need to work on (I'm looking at you EA). In fact Fortnite produces so many game updates, its produced more than EA has in the last decade. A Wiseman once said “to much of anything will put you off that particular thing” (probably), so are Fortnite’s updates more of a hindrance than a help?

Update 30,987 brings you: High Stakes (this is familiar…)

The newest addition to the game is the shockwave grenade, released just last week, with the rift to go item releasing 5 days earlier. These items are cool and fun to play with, adding a new feature to the gameplay, although do lack some originality — the rift to goes are just portable rifts, whilst the shock grenade is just the upgraded version of the impulse grenade. Are Epic Games running out of ideas? Even if they are, items like these are making their inferior predecessors, pointless, thus destroying an older part of the game, hindering the gameplay, as for 1, theirs to much variety in what loot you can pick up and 2, the repetitive gameplay is getting, dare I say it, boring… From my experience, all impulse Grenades are good for is knocking you’re team off a high cliff, whilst laughing until you can’t breath, and with the shockwave grenade, it does the exact same thing, but on a bigger scale.

This is similar with the trolley’s and the go carts; what's the point of a trolley that goes half the speed and can carry half the people, while a go cart is faster, funnier and simply better? So in essence, Fortnite aren’t bringing original ideas and concepts to the game, there building and replacing something with the exact same experience. Though, like some other famous guy said “don’t fix it, if it ain’t broken”, which maybe where Fortnite is coming from. They have the perfect game at the moment and they don’t want to ruin it by adding some brand new feature that could potentially put off thousands or even millions of players, so maybe cooking with the same ingredients, but making a different meal is the right thing to do (yeah, that was a weird analogy).

Definitely the best skins (it was all i could afford)

Despite there (sometimes) unoriginality, Fortnite’s updates are consistently bringing players back into the games, which is evident by the numbers, which obviously Epic Games quite likes, as they collected a rather dashing amount of just over $350 million in April alone, which is probably more than I'll earn in 100 lifetimes. But that was 4 months ago, and gaming moves as fast as light (which is 299,999,999 km/s by the way), so they continually try and release update after update, week after week to try and keep Fortnite alive.

Every game dies. Despite how much it makes, how popular it is, it is the sad truth. Minecraft is a great example; its one of the most popular games of all time, with a once registered 43 million players, and it died back in 2017. Minecraft Youtubers who’d built careers of off this game said they were ‘bored’ with Minecraft, as they’d literally been playing it day in and day out for 4 years and despite constant updates, people still became bored (and consequently moved onto Roblox). Minecraft died at the old age of 5. So based on this evidence, its clear to say that Fortnite will die to — Ninja will get bored as will many of his fans, which in fact is already happening. His YouTube stats show his view count dropping steadily, a likely foreshadowing to the close demise of Fortnite. Its true there’s a small spike every now and then when an update drops, but despite that, Fortnite’s player count is falling and will continue to (with the occasional large update spiking for a few days).

Leak promotional material for Fortnite 2

As I'm writing this Fortnite has in fact released 5 new skins under the title “the stakes are high”; and you know what, they look awesome and despite costing 2,000 vbucks each, thousands will probably buy them. This will probably continue for a while to come and with Fortnite being the highest monthly grossing game, pretty much ever, they can afford to do what they like, even if the change is little and slightly unoriginal, because those million 8 year olds will be typing in the last 4 digits of their Mom’s credit card to buy it.

Constant updates are the vaccine to prevent a game from going stale, but often and over a long period of time, this will get boring. Epic Games have the perfect strategy right now, with there season 6 just around the corner, producing 10s of more items and skins, that will rake in millions of dollars. But in the long run, like Minecraft (probably sooner), it will become an endangered species. The quick updates and new items are benefitting the game in the short term, but in the long run, its devaluing the updates, which will one day render the game less interesting to play, and the next gaming craze (ultra battle royale — 1000 vs 1000), will over shadow it in an instant.

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