Lights! Camera! …Marketing?
I turned 25 just a few days ago. 25’s a weird age because you don’t feel old enough to sit at the real adult table yet, but you’re also not relatable enough to the previous generation to hang with those younger than you. It’s like age purgatory. While I’ve resigned myself from abating the arms of Father Time, I always try my best to listen to my inner child.
It is said that dogs are man’s best friend. Unfortunately, my apartment superintendent was never pet friendly, so my best friend was my Playstation. I grew up with video games for most of my life, and while they haven’t been as prevalent in recent years, this pandemic has given me an excess of time to reflect on my old passions. But I’m also seeing instances that overlap my past and present.
The video game Fortnite, released almost 3 years ago, is one that, while in my collection, goes largely underused. Released free to the public, it grew immediately in popularity — with an immense player base of over 350 million as of May 2020. As someone who has witnessed the rise and decline of some of my memory’s greatest gaming experiences — Donkey Kong, Kirby, all the way to current-day hits like Red Dead Redemption, it’s astounding how Fortnite not only maintains, but grows their base year after year. But Fortnite is smart. Fortnite understands its community. And while the childish personas in-game that our youth use as dance inspiration may be too much for me, they interest the marketer within.
Fortnite’s player base lies in a largely younger audience, with kids no older than high school age at times. If I remember correctly, it took a lot to impress me as a high schooler because I always tried to act like I was cool (I wasn’t.). However, this is definitely the age where frills and thrills are the grand face of fun — and Fortnite knows a thing or two about frills and thrills. Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, have time and time again introduced a more complex and immersive experience, taking full advantage of the capabilities their programming can do with the game.
At its core, the objective of Fortnite is to both eliminate enemy players while also gathering resources that make it helpful to construct and manipulate the environment to your advantage, until you’re the last one standing. Fortnite became one of the first few games to introduce a larger number of players for a given activity — up to 100 people could participate in a “battle royale”, as they were called, and these games were intense. I played a few times during the quarantine, and I can’t remember a time that I was more confused about something my mom told me was “meant for children”. Mom, if children are doing this level of multitasking early on, our future’s in good hands. But, something about the cartoonish violence made me reminisce for a time when that would have kept me entertained for hours, likely ending with me begging (and losing to) my mom for one more game.
More recently however, Fortnite’s gone down a different route. They’ve taken advantage of the amassed groups of people playing their game, and given them a different purpose than just running and gunning: being an audience. This is in regards to a free “movie night” (amongst other events) that Fortnite hosted on June 26th, 2020. Players logging into the game had the option of visiting a “Party Royale” — an ode to Fortnite’s already-existing playlist, which brought them into a lobby that allowed them to watch 1 of 3 featured films (Inception, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige) that Fortnite even published a schedule for. In a way, it felt like a coronavirus-era movie theater, with tons of people crowding the spaces to get the best possible view, without the fear of being sneezed on. If not for the movie, this brought camaraderie (well-needed, considering the circumstances) to people — a whopping 28 million worldwide, who all got to enjoy time spent together not otherwise annihilating each other.
When attracting large audiences, Epic Games really hit for the fences with this event. This isn’t even the first time Fortnite’s attempted something on a scale this big. On April 23–25, 2020, Fortnite partnered with renowned hip-hop artist Travis Scott to play a free in-game concert as a giant-cartoony version of himself, an event that took in an audience of 12 million people. What I’m trying to say here is that Epic Games takes their player base, their customers, deeply into consideration. They listen to the feedback that people have, not only for quality-of-life fixes within the game, but for more out-of-the-box ideas. With such a low barrier of entry (Fortnite is still free to this day), anyone with a gaming system has access to all the future events that Fortnite hosts, and each event has been as, if not more entertaining than those that came before it. And every person attending movie night with a social media account and a hard-on for Christopher Nolan flicks? Well, that’s just bonus conversation right there.
Epic Games has blown open a field of possibilities for other developers to take into consideration. Providing a consistently good service to your player base is important, but Fortnite took the extra step and delivered an experience so amazing, so discussion-driving, on their own terms. Using their content to their advantage, they were able to mold their trademark image and layer it on something equally as prominent, thus creating something completely new that video game lovers, old and new, would both love and return for.
I hope this 25-year old can get there some day.
