How Fortnite is Becoming Profitable for Players
Fortnite used to be a very fun and simple game to play where the objective was to be the last player standing out of the 100 other players in a lobby. The direction for the game has taken a very different turn than what it was like back then. Just like any other video game in this era it has become a very competitive and skill based game and now has a huge community today. With pro players competing for tons of money in the tournaments, it has become a full-time job for some players.
Money
Fortnite has had an insane rise in popularity and is the foremost reason why Epic Games is now worth almost $14 Billion Dollars. With this amount of money in the company, the tournament earnings go for a lot of money. The top 3 players in the tournament making insane amounts of money to compete and this doesn’t include the sponsorships and the extra money they will make after.
Bizzle: Timothy Miller: $504,025.00
Tfue: Turner Tenney: $492,300.00
Cloak: Dennis Lepore: $417,025.00
(https://www.esportsearnings.com/games/534-fortnite/summary)
All three of these players being extremely successful Twitch streamers as well as successful youtube channels means that they are raking in quite a large sum of money from their viewers and subscribers as well. For example, Tfue the 2nd highest earning player from Fortnite also brings in about 4 million views on each of his youtube videos with 10 million subscribers as well. Point being that with all the revenue available with being good at this game it pays extremely well.
The game became even more competitive with the recent news of the Fortnite World Cup Finals. Starting on April 13 players will compete weekly to rank in the 1 million prize pool each week for the top players. If ranked high enough by July the players will move on to compete in the World Cup Finals in New York City with a $30,000,000 Prize pool. The #1 player of the tournament will walk away with $3,000,000 while the rest of the money is distributed to every other player in the tournament. Just by showing up you are guaranteed at least $50,000. The total amount of money being played for is $100,000,000 during the 2019 year. This absurd amount of money has skyrocketed the competitiveness of the once fun and easy game to pick up and play casually. (https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/competitive/en-US/news/fortnite-world-cup-details)
Trying to Keep New Players
With the ever improving skill gap of the players, it has become immensely hard for new players to pick up the game. With the game ever-evolving, it is almost becoming impossible for new players to play casually without being completely destroyed by the more experienced players. What Fortnite has tried to accomplish to get rid of this skill gap is instead of just putting in skill-based matchmaking they put in more tournaments to keep the competitive players out of the lobbies. Fortnite also implements updates to benefit the newer players instead of there more experienced players. This causes the community to become upset with the game developers because it begins to “ruin the game”. Fortnite is an ever-changing game with new strategies and metas all the time that force the player to learn and adapt to them to win games. When Fortnite decides to update the game, they end up making some of the skills and metas that people developed to become obsolete it causes lots of anger in the community. Many of these updates help with keeping the new players playing, but it has become a source of a problem for the competitive players.
Balancing the Game
What Fortnite really tries to accomplish is they want to balance out all of the factors of the game. Whether it is the strength of a certain weapon or how players can build throughout the game to counter enemies they will try to make it more of a balanced game for the newer and experienced players. This sometimes works very well and other times extremely bad. Some of the weapons in the game have a history of being able to completely throw off the pace of the game. Such as the two pump shotguns, or what it was called double pump while it was in the game. What this meta did was that a player would keep two weapon slots for two shotguns. When they would fire the first shot they would then switch to the second shotgun to get rid of the delay in between shooting the shotgun. What this caused was an extremely overpowered meta that would allow players to deal very high damage very quickly. The game became just a bunch of players using this meta and it was very unfair. Another way that Fortnite tries to balance the game is the vehicles throughout the game. When Fortnite was first released there were no vehicles. This made the game a lot slower with fewer fights and more walking around for long periods of time so that you might stumble across somebody. In today’s games what has happened is people will use the vehicles to go hunt for players and get higher eliminations in games. The Fortnite creators did not want this to happen so then they get rid of some of the vehicles and weapons and get nothing accomplished besides causing players to be upset. The game is truly community-based and everything really is narrowed down for the community to enjoy the game. With some updates, it causes many people to either love or hate the game. The game before all the updates, vehicles, weapons, and all the extra stuff in its purest form is truly enjoyable but Fortnite continues to change what made it so popular in the first place. That was the simplicity with the game and the fun environment. As time goes on it will become even more competitive and also profitable for many players but it is still debatable on whether or not this is the path that the game should go down.
