Member-only story
Why Fortnite Became the Most Addicting Game In History
An analysis of players’ stats using AI and K-Nearest Neighbor models.
Children are becoming so addicted to Fortnite that it’s causing panic in parents. With over 250 million players worldwide, $200 million monthly revenue, it seems everyone is playing Fortnite these days. Fortnite is becoming more addictive than heroin, according to some studies. Technology giants, such as Facebook, are now investing massive resources in the metaverse — our assumed future virtual world.
By exploiting a few simple psychological phenomena, Fortnite keeps giving young players a reason to return to the game even when they don’t want to. In this article, I look at the relationship between the number of minutes played and the player’s score.
The Data
I use lifetime statistics of 1400+ Forntine PC players in 5 game modes (Solo, Duo, Trios, Squads, and LTM). The data was collected during season 6 chapter 2 (April 2021) by Iyadali on Kaggle.com (free access) using public leaderboard data from tracker.gg. It includes the following information:
- score: total score,
- top1: total wins,
- kd: kill/death ratio,
- WinRatio: win ratio,
