Fortnite’s Mainstream Success Drove Me Away

There is no denying that Fortnite is huge. Its success is almost unrivalled in the videogame industry and the game itself has technically not even been fully released yet; both its Save the World cooperative mode and the far more popular Battle Royale are still in early access. It’s a success story that has unfolded in a relatively short time frame, as well. In August 2017, just prior to the release of Battle Royale, it was reported that Fortnite had attracted over a million players. Fast forward to June 2018 and the release of Battle Royale on Nintendo Switch and that number had skyrocketed to over 125 million, having climbed higher still since then.

In hindsight, that’s not a massive surprise by any stretch of the imagination. Smart business decisions made by Epic Games over the past few years have ensured that Fortnite is not only available pretty much everywhere, but can be played by and with almost anyone thanks to its free-to-play business model and the implementation of cross-platform play. Epic’s clever - though some might say, nefarious - use of microtransactions and its steadfast commitment to evolving the game through time-exclusive events and listening to feedback from its colossal community of players have further cemented Fortnite’s success. All these factors combined have transformed what was a relatively unknown tower defence/cooperative survival game into a cultural phenomenon, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars per month and showing absolutely no signs of slowing down.

If you've never played Fortnite... well, you might be clinically dead.

I myself was bitten by the Fortnite bug. I’ve easily spent hundreds of hours in Battle Royale, teaming up with friends to help each other complete the weekly challenges and score more battle tiers and cosmetic items. And most of that time was indeed time well spent. I’ve garnered a lot of fun out of Fortnite and have a wealth of stories I could regale you with, many of them concerning deaths that came about due to the less than tactically sound utilisation of impulse grenades (thanks for that by the way, Dean).

However, I’ve not played Fortnite for a good few months now and at the tail end of my time with the game, it lost a lot of what made it so enjoyable for me, largely due to the surge in popularity it experienced. Now, don’t misunderstand me here: I don’t have an inner hipster hammering away at a keyboard, desperate to tell the world about how I played Fortnite before it was cool, or anything like that. My gripes with Fortnite’s surge of mainstream success stem from the influx of new users that came with it; a battalion of younger players whose reflexes were more than a match for my own. There was a time when I thought of myself as a competent Fortnite player and builder, able to hastily construct barriers and shelters and hold my own against whatever opponents I happened upon. Now, though? All I can do is watch in utter disbelief as a child nowhere near half my age whizzes around, constructing buildings at a clip faster than I can fathom before popping up behind me - combat shotgun in hand - and putting me out of my misery.

This is Billy. Billy is 9 years old and likes Starburst and no-scoping you in the eye.

The final nail in the coffin came in the form of my 10-year old nephew. Playing one on one against him and witnessing first hand how disgustingly proficient he is when playing Fortnite hammered home the fact that my 34-year old self - waning reaction times and all - is hopelessly outmatched and just can’t effectively compete against what is now a substantial chunk of Fortnite’s user base. I’d noticed this with other competitive shooters prior to Fortnite: Call of Duty’s online component is something I’ve stayed well clear of for years now, for example, but I’d mainly purchase COD games for their single-player campaigns anyway so being driven away from their multiplayer modes was not something that I was particularly bothered by. However, having a competitive game that I’d invested so much time into and got so much enjoyment out of become essentially gated behind an age restriction? That’s been a much harder pill to swallow.