Origins
The High-Performers, go-getters, trend-setters, a Brave New World, and a world of unstocked toilet paper shelves. A story of the Battle Royale genre at a par for the course, scratch me down for
Scratch me down for the double eagle.
I was going to make a YouTube video, I’ll try to be as succinct as possible instead on this post to convey this story as I have verbally have so many times, and then people say, “why don’t you make a YouTube.”
YouTube is a lot of work so here’s an article, scratch me down for the double eagle.
I would roll around in a golf cart and pick up balls, already wrote about I’d listen to Drake’s new album, the one with Tuscan Leather on it— this is around 2009-11.
On an AFB I’d tie the rope around the back of the cart as jets flew over me, those were my resources, no electric golf ball picker upper, I already wrote about it.
This article is not about me specifically, only a little tangentially about me and the origins of the Battle Royale genre as per through my own perspective, as I would wine and dine and talk to friends about at steak dinners, but there’s so much history their eyes would glaze over usually because they’re not gamers.
Though anyone who’s a gamer today knows what the Battle Royale genre is, or “BRs,” it’s a movie right? Just a movie called Battle Royale, there’s no popular games of this last person standing genre out there right?
Ah, right there is. It may have started with one, or two men, one named Dean Hall another Brendan Greene… and many others like Jordan Tayer who gamed with and helped popularize Survivor GameZ that a company would later appropriate the game mode to mass market cosmetic clothes in a mobile game… we all know what the name of the game is but we don’t hear often of the prehistory (kind of like Bitcoin’s prehistory when you think about it… see my other substack articles)…
Those other games and mods:
Arma II
Arma III
Arma II DayZ mod (and many other awesome mods spawned from it)
Arma II and III Battle Royale
H1Z1: Just Survive
H1ZI: King of the Kill
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS/PUBG by Bluehole corporation/PUBG Corporation
and so many other survival and battle royale games that have become infamous ever since, such as Fortnite as I’ve added a section on its history to the end of the article...
Moving on from the history of Fortnite (since that is what most people see as the definitive Battle Royale game), and stepping back in time a bit— I was drawn to rebuild a third computer in my life in the time leading up to the release of Elder Scrolls Online.
I didn’t catch the Survivor GameZ, Twitch (and Bitcoin) weren’t as much on my radar even, I thought they were cool but I was focused or at least trying to focus with my limited resources on school… and work… and I missed the justin.tv transition although I believe I did hear of people like DjWheat broadcasting games on the internet or their full-time lives and thought oh that is very cool I probably will try to learn more about that I’m sure it will progress.
Oh did it progress, so I got more entrenched and interested and tuned into “The ESO Podcast,” featuring Soma and Deagan. It was cool they were all collaborating on this cool project thing, promoting a game, talking about all the intricate mechanics and class-building theory, I was already very active on the ESO forums too and looking forward to probably specializing in a Dark Elf nightblade…
Then the beta was a little spotty for ESO, the player base dwindled a tad. They were then talking about something else, a daisy? No that’s a flower (LUL), it was a game called DayZ. Soma also was fostering an amazing community, collaborating with so many other creators in the space. I remember him describing it on a cast once as a “talk show set in a post-apocalyptic landscape” to paraphrase. It was unique and positive, uplifting, and sometimes there was singing. Chat would talk about the industry, we’d talk about life, and he would discuss things with big name developers and muse with other up and comers like Lirik who were getting popular in these DayZ events too. It was cool to see the viewership grow on a channel and soon I’d be trekking with a big personality on Twitch as well with other community members with our bug out bags on and fire axes out, trying to stay alive as the viewer count would exceed 1,000 and help contribute to a smooth production. I’m a little biased as well since I would stick around as a loyal viewer and became moderator attempting to contribute to the good vibes, I would chat with the web dev in the community and I created guides on how to open the game launcher and join a match. Computer gaming is a really special thing, it’s social and blends art and engineering.
I became fascinated, it was like old-school gaming again, it was exciting, it was awesome to play— it struck me differently with a lack of HUD, it’s expansive open-world, and heightened feeling of immersion. It was created by someone who learned to program who came out of the New Zealand army and had stated he got the idea from going to SERE school (for people who haven’t binged all of 24 with Keither Sutherland’s character Jack Bauer) SERE school means Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Usually you try not to starve in SERE school, probably. Dean Hall then makes an Arma II mod (a new add-on to a video game created usually by the community), and it was intricate and brilliant called Arma II DayZ mod. It had a cool launcher, I discovered this community on the tail end and didn’t catch Survivor GameZ but I related to the community as many were military veterans and I’m a military brat. I played Arma II DayZ mod and it was immersive and fun, running away from zombies—- another thing that struck me is if you downed a person it doesn’t show up on your HUD like the run and gunning I disliked from the newer CODs since the first Call of Duty and United Offensive mod as I wrote about in my very last substack.
You had to stay alive, you had hydration meters and food meters, you had to scavenge a desolate world and avoid getting killed by zombies and other players. You’d shout “friendly” and it’d evolve into an awesome experience, every life was a new story, it was so awesome.
A lot of the early modding community would work on a new exciting mods together in Arma II and Arma III as well, directly contributing to development. Small teams of great minds would iterate on this new survival genre forming as the player count in the mods would begin to exceed 50,000 as Arma II DayZ mod was released. It was very impressive, and it was awesome to witness and be a part of.
Dean Hall was then tapped by Bohemia Interactive to work on standalone version.
Meanwhile, Jordan “Soma” Tayer went to go work for Twitch after a successful interview and aired on the very first Twitch Weekly.
Before those things all happened, another gentlemen whom I interacted with twice on TeamSpeak would hop into the TeamSpeak channel and I’d help shepherd the subscribers into a match— I chatted with him only very briefly as he set up the server and hopped out. At this point he had modded Arma III Battle Royale, and his online moniker was PLAYERUNKNOWN, but his name is Brendan Greene and I’m not sure how exactly, basically was able to brand his alias he had chose (Playerunknown) as the lead mod and created a new genre/game mode (please don’t sue me Epic or Apple I don’t have the cash on hand you do lol) of video game while living in Brazil, an Irish guy at his computer with a baby mama also in Brazil. The inspiration allegedly came from the movie Battle Royale, and the mod was spurred on the heels of the DayZ Mods, at least chronologically I am pretty sure that is about aligned. Arma II scene led to the Arma III scenes. Survivor GameZ was a massive tournament (kind of like the Hunger Games movies also popular during this time), in the DayZ universe. Then Arma III Battle Royale as it came to be played by streamers who began to grow larger audiences was downloaded for the Arma III mods.
He then was flown to CA to work on H1Z1: King of the Kill (I think that is kind of a weird name to be honest), but this impacted game development so much.
He posted a picture of him in a plane going to go consult for the project.
Then he flew out to Korea to work for Bluehole Corporation…
Then DayZ standalone released, (this was not the Bluehole Corporation in Korea working on PUBG this was Bohemia Interactive that released Standalone, a great moment in gaming history when Dean Hall interacted with the live chat while demoing the compass in the new open-world standalone, official version of the DayZ video game). If you criticized this amount of effort at that time, I simply dare you to embark on something this expansive and difficult to popularize, and climb mount Everest after (which Dean Hall also did you may follow him over at @rocket2guns on X if I didn’t already mention that).
I would be playing with Soma (the name is a reference to the substance in the book Brave New World), and sometimes I’d just sit back in my Turkey home on kinda slow internet with a high ping and then long in next to him as decked out as I could be (he’d chat about the vet for his dog and I would be struggling with a Logitech headset I got from the BX with a low charge lol), and his viewership rose enough where streamers on the internet could just about make a living, and it was awesome… he started topping like 1,000 viewers and then got a job at Twitch and made Forbes’ 30 under 30 interviewing the likes of the cast of Jessica Jones (me kind of star-struck sitting there tuned in with Carrie-Ann Moss, you know the Trinity from the Matrix, sitting near to Luke Cage on the right), too many Gen Zers haven’t seen The Matrix Trilogy and it shows (it’s probably one of the greatest feats of cinema of our time, puts a lot of other movies to shame IMHO), we need more people pushing the needle forward…
I hopped into a TeamSpeak once with Dean Hall too, he asked if I had Space Engineers and we were just chatting as gamers do for a moment (I unfortunately didn’t have it installed, maybe because I usually have a lower attention span since I got a little too much into the Battle Royale genre), but he was a developer and building cool things.
”Arma II runs on the Real Virtuality 3 engine, which is an upgraded version of Bohemia Interactive's game engine used in earlier military simulations. Arma III uses a more advanced version called Real Virtuality 4, offering better graphics and physics. DayZ, originally a mod for Arma II, was later developed as a standalone game using a modified version of the Real Virtuality engine, but eventually transitioned to the Enfusion engine for better performance and features.”
In fact, the DayZ engine was renamed that because they had to just modify the base engine so much they just called it something else, can you believe that?! I find that kind of amusing actually! But also, what a feat! To be clear as well the Enfusion engine was rebranded much later, probably around or just before 2017ish. I believe that much of the community is overtly harsh on the late development of DayZ sometimes in sensationalist articles, a lot of gaming can be this way obviously. So much of art is subjective and it’s difficult to retain as what all the gamers want to hop on the train of what DjWheat I remember would say is “the new hotness.” But I also remember playing with DjWheat and we’d play a match of Heroes of the Storm and I remember him saying “let’s make a memory.” We are really social beings in the end I think, and gaming despite what people sometimes refer to it as being anti-social, the numbers since the 90s say otherwise, since we can connect in the world easier as Mark Zuckerberg early identified and capitalized on that niche to connect us, it’s not just one species that shares this characteristic, most species seek to connect… Humans just have technology too, and the capability to create amazing worlds and experiences. Identifying what may catch on is an inert gift, and that is always shifting, gaming is not just utility but swaths of different individuals who find like-minded communities and interests too. Cliffy B from my last article, in G4 interviews as he got people excited and in one interview KP would compliment his ability to create these worlds, they both recognized this. When I met him we spoke for a few minutes and early in the conversation I mentioned to him Dark and Darker and he immediately conveyed to me this fact too, it’s difficult to know what will be next on people’s minds sometimes and capture that, to paraphrase. But what is so cool, is we are all so connected in today’s day and age and can share our art, it’s truly an awesome time to be alive.
Despite any critics who say Dean Hall may have abandoned DayZ or something along those lines, as I was mentioning sensationalists, as you may gather it’s really much more nuanced than that in my opinion. Bohemia Interactive bought the rights for DayZ, it started as just a mod for the game. It was no longer really Dean Hall’s project as made clear limitations in the engine as systems progressed, but what is clear is its impact and it still brings the masses still playing the title to share in its wonder of a story you make your own every time you load in (a funny or maybe true thing to criticize is as the larger swaths of online players hop in unfortunately— before it was even just a small landing pad… that was the very first iteration of Battle Royale you’d load in on a small landing pad in the Army Simulator and you would be hot micing). As we were loading into Arma II Battle Royale you’d be standing in a line then grab weapons and have to run away. You wouldn’t actually wait and hot drop in or anything, I would be standing there and Soma or others would be nearby in our pseudo military fatigues and there was a gentlemen’s agreement to run away, this of course lead to lots of hilarity as you grab guns first in the first mods and then run away and try to be the last Hunger Games survivor (just noting in Arma II it was similar and looked like DayZ mod and you’d start in different settings like a warehouse before Arma III as well and further development). But, maybe less funny is now as you may notice when playing Epic Game’s version you aren’t hot micing before you hot drop in Fortnite, perhaps that should be criticized moreso than people “abandoning” DayZ). I’m not afraid to add a write as well… people would sometimes shout “Taiwan #1” before the acquisition, and those mics are also now silenced. Dean Hall released DayZ standalone and climbed Mount Everest after releasing DayZ, kind of badass. Well not kind of, really— and then he opened up a new studio called RocketWerkz, after stating how he was working as a creative director for one game at Bohemia and it was probably time to move on, and he did just that opening a game studio and releasing awesome new titles in his native country. I remember one of those first titles before Icarus or his Space sim game too was “Out of Ammo.” Out of Ammo is an RTS army sim game! I remember walking into a mall here in Cary that had an early VR experience store where you could demo the HTC Vive (I had the gen 1 at home too), and I’d get them to load up Out of Ammo in the store too to play and show off to people which was really cool, an army vet from Soma’s community also works at RocketWerkz too!
New Zealand would be awesome to visit one day, anyways back to the story.
I won an Arma II or III Battle Royale tournament once (I honestly forget which I was playing I think it was II), I won one (not to brag) that Soma was shoutcasting,
Later, Brendan Greene said in a TeamSpeak after one of the four servers went down he needs people to stress test an Arma III Battle Royale server. I hopped in and I was the last one to leave, but it was really cool. Having got to participate in this little bit of gaming history was very cool, interacting with awesome and positive communities of people around the world, creating content and ushering their supporters into this cool new exciting and social game mode felt special. The first Twitch Con happened, the early Twitch community before the acquisition was sometimes heralded by many of the old guard as the golden age of Twitch. I sometimes agree with this, streamers were setting a new bar of media production issuing in an entirely new career. People were building livelihoods, hosting really innovative interactive shows on the Twitch Con stage, and big streamers would even propose to their significant others after amassing small fortunes to start their own new media empires, and it has now engulfed a lot of our cultural zeitgeist. With or without Battle Royale, it was cool to continue to interact with H1Z1 devs like Arclegger / https://x.com/Arclegger in real time with player feedback and ex-Twitch employees he also employed and also progress my own craeer. Him and his team were working on mechanics for H1Z1 who worked at Sony Online Entertainment as it was rebranded Daybreak Games whom they were employed… (which was also crazy to be a part of because as I’ve written before I was involved in creating websites and participating in The Matrix Online community, and on the company payroll directly employed by later RockstarGames and Ubisoft when I was a little younger… and these others became part of the Sony Online Entertainment portfolio before MxO was canceled, also previously Monolith Productions where the actual developers for that title were housed and under the publisher, as I remember SOE team member citing as too costly to maintain)...
See how a little unironically comical and convoluted a bit the gaming industry is?
We would discuss the intervals on care drops in H1Z1, I would provide feedback to the H1Z1 dev teams sometimes in twitter back and forth and once H1Z1 development stagnated after Just Survive many of their team members have gone on to work at Twitch too, or other new projects. I would run into and play with KP in PUBG and with the community in Left for Dead while working on promoting their projects for various clients, then Kevin Pereira and his tech production lead (the Red Bull guy who also set up Ducksauce’s computer), and KP would travel and interview Matthew Rhoades (who got married to Adrianne Curry) here for a show on truTV called Super Into— you can see a tour of their setup here time stamped below (this was before they were among an early exodus out of LA to the middle of our country where he has enjoyed a lucrative career as well doing voice over for movie trailers):
I remember running into Ducksauce in H1Z1 in this live talk show environment in a funny interaction, and participating in his fun community and chat— I remember a moment when they were gaming, he dropped an item in Diablo 3 Adrianne needed, and you can see from their setup— it was hilarious, he immediately just picked it up and stopped moving. Then she had to run into his soundproof studio from the other room and chat got to witness a live stream playful struggle for the loot item which was very funny. Just authentic moments with like-minded gamers who were into technology, gaming, and fun new content. Gaming is an awesome cathartic past-time in my opinion, and many successful people I know who are engineers game, it’s a past time and I do believe it should be done in moderation— mentioning HealthyGamer.gg again. However, those who would argue against that stance as it makes the rounds too could cite that even Ninja (Richard Tyler Blevins) still was working at Nando’s too as he worked on his career, and he had great work ethic. Toweliee was among some of these streamers who had a great work ethic and would publicize the keys to his success and earned media. Ninja’s book, despite what you think about Fortnite, is actually a really good book about making sure your audio quality is good, and how to perfect your craft. You could also notice Soma’s success in that regard, similar to Ninja he was able to lockdown his alias on nearly all social media platforms, like Shroud too. There’s nuances in every industry, and hard work and dedication really is a key identifier here. It seems like Blevins stumbled into his success sometimes living a real world Ready Player One, but you can see in his media appearances when asked by Mainstream News anchors and Ellen DeGeneres “how much money are you losing right now by being here,” he would answer truthfully the numbers, which are staggering. Years before only some, maybe a dozen first began earning up to and then starting to earn more than $300K/mo through just one funnel and one platform, a couple years ago to today it has increased and confirmed in a leak of financials dozens and dozens of pages of individuals receiving millions of dollars a month in payouts and verifiable through just a few of their revenue sources. The economy never had such opportunity that existed before and has since very much been changing, for people to earn this much from their homes or connecting with others in these unique ways… Just as much as going live consistently and just pressing the button that the barrier of entry is a broadband connection is important, the things you do to add to your production, or something simple as work on your communication skills and focus and just having good audio is almost a never-ending task to perfect. I may of cited this number being redundant but even a couple years ago, up to eight million americans were going live each month total. And as that saying goes, “the rising tide raises all ships.”
Then, Brendan Greene after his run-ins as an amazing modder at other studios helped develop as lead at Bluehole— PUBG. Microsoft became the publisher for the console version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in 2017, he got some huge payouts, the following to be precise,
Via Perplexity:
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As the creator of PUBG, Greene benefited substantially from the game's massive success:
1. PUBG has generated enormous revenue, with total earnings reaching over $13 billion by Q3 2022, including the mobile version[3].
2. Greene's estimated net worth as of 2024 is around $220 million, largely attributed to the success of PUBG[1].
3. The game sold over 30 million copies on Steam alone by February 2018, becoming one of the best-selling video games on PC and Xbox One[3].
4. PUBG's rapid growth and popularity led to substantial earnings within its first few months of release. By May 2017, it had already generated an estimated $60 million in revenue[3].
5. Greene's financial success is particularly notable given that just six years before PUBG's release, he was reportedly making only $300 a month[5].
While the exact details of Greene's financial arrangements with PUBG Corporation (now part of Krafton) are not public, it's clear that as the game's creator, he has profited significantly from its success. This financial windfall allowed him to establish his own independent studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to pursue new projects[2][4].
Citations:
[1] https://www.subzin.com/brendan-greene-net-worth-2024/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayerUnknown
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pfjj9g/pubg_creator_brendan_greene_goes_independent_with/
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/26/pubg-creator-went-from-welfare-to-making-a-billion-dollar-video-game.html
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/04/26/how-brendan-greene-went-from-collecting-welfare-checks-to-cashing-big.html
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/8xftry/50_million_copies_of_pubg_have_been_sold_so_far/
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There’s still more to the story, you read that right via Perplexity up there “$220 million” net worth, paraphrasing his words, I’m a simple Irish guy I just need a little alcohol and my computer and I’m happy. Baby mama probably happy too, he named the first PUBG map after his daughter, Erangel. No one I know or tell that too even knows that.
I almost didn’t play PUBG at first, I didn’t like the textures (people are weird I guess, I’m a little picky I assume), but you can thank another nice streamer couple from the U.K. for that— Soma hosted them once is how I discovered them, a couple of good vibes Twitch Streamers who would play DayZ too first streaming under his account on /oshi7 (sorry if I got that wrong), and later twitch.tv/fremily: https://fremily.bio.link/, they have a pretty dope setup and moved to London.
Meanwhile, Kevin Pereira revives Attack of the Show on twitch.tv/attack I tune into that and comingle with their entire community and make some cool assets, more history. I still have friends from these communities and we’ve all grown in our careers and connections since. So then, I drop over 1K hours in PUBG. Usually at 1K hours you’re ready to try out your hand in scrims (or scrimmages) and start tackling the pro scene. I had a friend try and go pro in Shadowrun before (he did compete for a team), and then I delved more into eSports myself and played in charity events for TempoStorm with a now Red Bull employee, and Soma went to go work for TempoStorm around this time too, this is a long story I forget the dates sometimes… Oh, and Jeff Leach is a hilarious comedian that would stream with him, and I’m so happy has become very successful, and continuously working on amazing projects— including even voicing another character in the now critically acclaimed NCSoft title they just released Throne and Liberty too!
I got some TempoStorm merch and I then headed to DreamHack Austin (I was still pretty bright-eyed and unfortunately the pandemic happened the following year), I was in the streamer lounge, met Shroud and Doc, and listened to some really cool and all very intelligent people such as one student who was creating his own video game too— there was an aisle there and he was there with his sister, it was really cool. I checked out the CS:GO stage, the SC2 stage, I was in the Bring Your Own Computer section as Doc handed me his in-game PUBG skin and did a double-take on the chubby cheeked nerd behind the keyboard, I met Shroud briefly twice as I directed him to the correct baggage claim and took a selfie later when I thought it also more appropriate, that media is all on my twitter.
I met the TempoStorm coach too who was there with their team, and we had a nice dinner. Later I would game with Venerated who later went from pro PUBG to Fortnite, I came in 2nd on the stage in the first exhibition match, and I was there with three awesome dudes on my part where we got together and sat next to each other at the LAN… We split our squad to teams of two— one guy was on his hall pass weekend he just had a baby and was a little rusty in the game, he went to my team of the duos. I created an eSport team called Urban Scorpions as well and we were registered on most of the eSport platforms, some of my teammates were also competing in Rocket League at DreamHack. I definitely don’t think about this often, we played slightly passively and Shadow ran up on my left at the end circle. I knew how to win PUBG matches, I’ve won seven in a row before. My mate went down, I without hesitation started a revive on high ground where I knew I may have not had time— I’d rather go down helping someone then for glory.
The smoke popped, he was up, I tagged Shadow twice with my M4, then a grenade got me, never got good with the Kobe. The LAN match also patched the radius of grenades specifically for that match, but I made the decision not to try to return fire— I may had lost that— or not if I separated myself more from my high ground cover for an angle, I don’t know. Every gamer has stories of their height or pinnacle of gaming, millions of gamers game but only a select few go pro and of those very little % make the most money, this is becoming easier to do in our information economy but I also highly recommend HealthyGamer.GG run by a doctor and psychologist who streams on Twitch.
Venerated would play the slow side of the circle, was pretty brilliant, I find most tournaments have the top fraggers, and the ones that are great at both and positioning, I find the highest levels of eSports it becomes almost a mental game of who knows the meta the most and probably remains calm after 1K hours too at least. Joe Rogan often says “you can be an expert at anything usually after 1,000 hours.”
Anyways, people working on Arma got payouts from Bohemia, people working at Twitch got payouts from Amazon.
Dean Hall is probably going to play Standalone tomorrow after all this time after teasing on twitter (and releasing half a dozen games under his own studio)… October 11-12th, 2024. That should be really exciting! Looking forward!
Editing: It was actually very fun! Lots of laughs in the first couple hours and he streamed some real gamer hours up to like 7 hours or more here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2273783622. To add as well here, DayZ released Frontline an official expansion/mod to DayZ on October 15th including a new snow environment and many new mechanics, as top streamers and personalities are still enjoying the open-world survival and canvas of exploration and possibilities that is DayZ.
Also, check out @Soma who streams frequently and is working at a new studio IRONMACE Games (https://www.ironmace.com/) based in South Korea, who have released so far a highly rated and critically acclaimed extraction game with an incredibly intricate and compelling class structure called “Dark and Darker,” which is also now peaking the charts in viewership on Twitch as well!
It’s really funny that in an apocalypse it seems people would go for the toilet paper, a non-essential item, or that they just take up more space on the shelf, it becomes a funny phenomenon.
I respect a lot of people in this community, and I will probably make a tweet sometime in my life thanking everyone who helped keep me positive,
From that inspirational moment when Dean Hall opened a compass on a live stream and it looked brilliant to now, with new and old friends and acquaintances…
I will probably add and edit this further and add more things but let’s be honest, it’s gotten pretty lengthy so far and I probably left out a lot and talked about so much, but I will try to aggregate more information soon— usually if you refresh my articles you’ll find them proofread.
Dean Hall once said in an interview (as he types away faster code than nearly everyone I’ve ever seen since as I watched him once typing away on a game he was making featuring trains, probably faster than my AACC professor who designed radar systems and she even coded without a reference), he said in a short interview I tuned into and quote often in my own interviews sometimes at a conference:
”Money doesn’t solve problems, time and people do.”
I’m italicizing this last part of the article as it goes into the history moreso of specifically Fortnite, feel free to skip if you don’t want to read about Fortnite:
I might add as well the early access alpha craze that became popularized in the early 2010s as well. It used to be when a game was in beta, beta testers were invited and alpha was usually internal testing. However, gaming companies soon figured out that in the age of gold-certifying games and printing them on CD-ROMs and paying testers for games was over, and instead could enlist the help of the masses to test their game in early stages while at the same time marketing it. Much later, after countless titles did this, Fortnite was released as Save the World— the initial thought at Epic Games was to create a mobile-esque tower defense game anyone could play anywhere on any platform (this was as 5G connectivity was also getting more popularized). Some of their early commercials also targeted this on-the-go new gaming IP. Fortnite’s concurrent player count actually dwindled greatly after the Save the World release fell flat and it may had been clear it was at that time a tower defense flop. Then, after PUBG sold so many copies (as I reference earlier in this article), they added an “Early Access” game mode called Fortnite: Battle Royale Early Access Alpha. These words “Early Access” were still plastered on every loading screen despite the concurrent player count then beginning to rival PUBG’s 30 million copies sold. It was at that time lawsuits started getting thrown out as Fortnite’s parent company (Epic Games that has the rights to the Unreal engine that PUBG used), would try to combat the rights of the genre… it was then determined… you cannot copyright a game mode. From there… they had their own lawsuits later with Apple— at first may had been a publicity stunt we don’t know, but it ended with them actually be kicked off the App Store since they refused to kneel to the 30% cut… I don’t know all the specifics of the lawsuit, but there were also rounds going around as new Battle Royale games hit the scene with Apex Legends on the legality of loot boxes and promoting gambling and ethics to younger gamers. I am more on the fence of we shouldn’t really allow loot box shenanigans if we can help it, blatantly, as some countries have actually passed laws against this. In most MMOs though there is a rule-of-thumb that you shouldn’t be able to pay to win at all, but you can pay for cosmetics— and this is held true in most games that are successful for the most part. Funnily enough in Apex Legends’ Battle Royale (by EA games) there are what some refer to as Pay To Win skins that the cosmetic of the weapon does indeed kind of make it easer to win do to it’s ability to “ADS” or aim down sight easier with more visibility that are still in the game, but this is also somewhat personal preference of the FPS gamer playing. However, we can all agree that Epic already made its over $3 Billion Dollar a year bag and since exponentially growing revenue off the Fortnite Battle Royale title, lining the pockets of their executive teams and 49% Tencent stakeholders, and their creative directors, those on the lower rungs supporting the games though are caught in the corporate machine sometimes as specified here. I often bring up the fact, as I had just taken an offer to work for Ubisoft instead of going for the Epic Games roles for Fornite that were posted before its release here in Cary, North Carolina, this was in 2017-18 before they added Battle Royale and the game was yet to release… I didn’t think Fortnite would be popular and Save the World did flop a bit, but even had I worked for Epic I don’t think I would have seen any big changes in my pay as specified in that Polygon article I linked a few sentences ago— since Epic Games is such a behemoth of a company now, but I greatly respect their developers and solid release of Unreal Engine 5 and many other cool titles like Dauntless since, but wen new Unreal Tournament? Epic, now supporting a game as a service, has to be perpetually cognizant when things go down it means untold millions of dollars left on the table in just hours, kind of like RockstarGames’ GTA Online… Epic Games wasn’t going to squander their new cash cow. This did benefit some streamers though like Ninja— initially on the Halo scene (fun fact we were actually in the same Halo clan called Knowledge, Strength, Integrity or KSI so many years ago— he also is only one day younger than me, and I am totally not jaded of his success), he then competed with the eSport team Cloud9. Later he became a successful streaming personality and delved into PUBG, showing passion after each win and each loss. Once Battle Royale was released as the new game mode on Fortnite, the timing was perfect for Ninja’s charismatic and high-octane stream at the same time too, Twitch was acquired by Amazon and added Twitch Prime subscriptions (everyone with an Amazon subscription would get a free Twitch sub to use every month on their favorite streamer)… This may not had been one of many things making Fortnite successful, but everyone in the Twitch community knows this and it’s almost a meme now to ask your viewers for the Twitch Prime sub they still get for free each month… This positive feedback loop of user-generated content and high-octane suspenseful gameplay helped cement Fortnite further as one of the most popular games in the world. Ironically though, while R* brings in billions on their title selling GTAV still, many now play on roleplaying servers not officially sponsored by R* with a mod called “FiveM,” and Fortnite on the other hand— originally not intended to be a competitive eSport game has brought in the masses to its frenetic third-person combat. As many PC gaming enthusiasts spout contradictorily though, they don’t like how Fortnite targets a younger demographic clearly and the frenzy to spend money on cosmetics or “skins,” and many PC gamers don’t play the game and opt for more realism in games like Escape from Tarkov, an extraction shooter (that is less forgiving). Fortnite is arguably more forgiving in its gunplay and mechanics— someone who has two hours played can eliminate someone with 100s if they just stand behind a rock correctly (though building and the other nuances of a game a player tries to perfect also are a factor here too of course, and require a degree of skill and practice), see chart below:
