Gaming as a shared experience: Fortnite and Pokémon Go
The stereotype of gaming as a solitary experience has been crumbling for some time, but 2018 might be the year that it finally faded to dust. Social gaming and shared experiences are now of such mass appeal that developers have fully embraced the concept and made it a core feature of their games — and their marketing strategies.
There are examples everywhere you look in the gaming world. FPS juggernaut Call of Duty recently announced that it would be ditching its traditional single-player campaign altogether in this year’s Black Ops 4. Multiplayer mobile games like Agar.io and Clash Royale have dominated the App Store charts in recent years. In fact, a quick glance at the charts today shows a host of multiplayer titles occupying the top spots: Hole.io, King of Glory: Revenge, Clash of Thrones: Rome Chaos, Battlelands Royale.
There’s two other examples conspicuous by their absence from that list — you’ve probably heard of them — Fortnite Battle Royale and Pokémon Go.
The rise in popularity of Fortnite — and similar battle royale games — has been incredible. Epic’s massively-multiplayer shooter has become a cultural phenomenon, arguably the biggest thing in gaming since Minecraft. It’s a dominant force on PC and console, and a chart-topping mobile app. It’s been played by Drake and had its dance moves imitated by world-famous footballers.
Pokémon Go was another sensation on its launch, with city streets packed with players catching Pikachus and Pidgeys and setting them to battle. It was recently revealed that the game had hit its highest player count since its 2016 peak, and raked in over $100m in May this year — a rise of 174%.
Pokémon Go’s blend of augmented reality gameplay with a beloved Nintendo franchise has ensured that it was no flash in the pan. Fortnite is newer but its number of players is actually increasing. Q: What do these two games have in common that make them so darn popular? A: they’re fun, they’re accessible, and they encourage shared experiences.
The joy of sharing
Games are now meant to be shared, and Pokémon Go and Fortnite are two clear examples. Both games have a loose structure that allows for players to create their own narratives, experiences and emotional responses. Whether that’s getting a tip-off from a friend that there’s a Vaporeon outside Buckingham Palace or sniping your way through a bunch of opponents, these personal moments are made for sharing because they feel unique to the player, rather than being a sequence of linear, scripted events that you know every other player will have gone through.
Pokémon Go is set up to be social: whether that’s crowds gathering around local landmarks to pick up Pokéballs or do battle, or the newly-introduced friendship features, it’s a game where you benefit from playing with other people.
Tiny actions within the game become moments of achievement: capturing a Pokémon or registering a Fortnite kill is as satisfying the 100th time as it was the first, with each one giving you a tangible in-game reward. This in itself isn’t a new phenomenon, but when you tie it to the next point, it becomes a powerful thing.
Sharing gameplay is easy
Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook — it’s never been easier to share your best gaming moments, or to open them up for people all over the world to experience them with you in real-time. Twitch streamer Ninja shattered the platform’s viewing record with his Fortnite stream, pulling together a dream team of NFL star JuJu Smith-Schuster, plus musicians Drake and Travis Scott, to join him in the game.
Videos and GIFs can be shared to a host of social networks or messaging services with the push of a button, and more people than ever are doing just that. At Megacool, we’ve worked to make this easier for players than ever before, with the ability to preview your awesome gameplay moments and share it with friends in just a few seconds.
Sharing is now so important in gaming that we have Share buttons on our consoles, and tech company Nvidia have made it a major selling point of their latest PC graphics cards.
There’s a demand for shared moments
The idea of watching other people play games online may have felt fairly preposterous as little as ten years ago — today it’s the norm. ESports like Dota or League of Legends regularly carry prize pools of millions of dollars and get shown on ESPN.
There’s a huge audience with a huge demand for this kind of shared content — and it’s not just players in awe of the skills of pro gamers. Cool, lucky or just plain random moments from games are all immortalised in GIF or video format and shared far and wide. Large-scale gaming events are now common, with Pokémon Go recently staging a huge gathering in Dortmund that drew hundreds of thousands of would-be Pokémon trainers from all over the globe.
Sharing can be streamlined
Despite all this, there is still much that could be done to improve the sharing experience for players in games like Pokémon Go and Fortnite on mobile. While Epic’s shooter has a host of sharing options on PC (easy access to streaming platforms, for example), that functionality is lacking on mobile devices. While these two games have highly-shareable moments — cool kills, capturing a rare Pokémon, winning a gym battle — it can still be a chore for the player to share those moments as gameplay clips.
The huge difference between how easy it is for players to share clips on PC vs mobile was one of the main drivers in the creation of Megacool. We want to make sure that players can “share the shareable”, and we’re excited about the future of mobile gaming as a shared experience.
Conclusion
Sharing and shared experiences are here to stay, and best of all, developers are still only really scraping the surface of what’s possible. Future iterations of massively-multiplayer shooters, AR games, or even the platforms to which they’re shared on, will bring greater innovations and optimisations. At Megacool we’re dedicated to making the experience of sharing as easy as possible for the player (see our Best Practices post for more insight on this), in the knowledge that part of the joy of play is now letting others feel some of that emotion too.
