Before there was Warzone, Fortnite, or even PUBG: Battlegrounds, there was Minecraft Survival Games. While the exact origin is nebulous, Norwegian YouTuber Dennis Vaeride is credited as launching the first Survival Games server in April 2012, just one month after The Hunger Games’ film adaptation had opened in cinemas. The concept followed the rules outlined in Katniss’ harrowing ordeal: dozens of players would sprint into the middle of a starting circle, gather supplies, and then hunt until the last one standing.
Little did Vaeride know, he’d just fired the starting pistol on an industry-wide battle royale. Many studios would try to replicate this formula. Few would survive. Those that did would grow fat on microtransactions and spiralling player counts.
Last year the market for the battle royale sub-genre was valued at $11.2 billion. It is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2035. Everyone’s chasing the money and almost all of them are discovering just how difficult it is to carve out their own piece of the pie – even heavyweights like Halo Studios and monied companies like Amazon Games have failed miserably. It’s a financial frenzy that can be traced all the way back to those Hunger Games-inspired Minecraft servers… although the true spark that set the industry ablaze came a year later, from a single developer living in Brazil.
In early 2013, Brendan Greene had an idea for a DayZ mod (the zombie survival game that was itself a mod of mil-sim ARMA, and was already responsible for whipping the survival genre into a frenzy on PC). Inspired not by The Hunger Games but by Kinji Fukasaku’s similarly themed 2000 thriller, Battle Royale, Greene’s idea was a last-player-standing multiplayer mode that took place on a large map scattered with weapons and restricted by a shrinking circular safe area. He developed what became PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale over a number of years, and his association with the format became so significant that Sony brought him on as a consultant whilst developing the competing H1Z1.
But Sony wasn’t the only major studio that took notice of Greene’s rise. South Korean studio Bluehole offered him the chance to create his own project. That game was PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds – a 100-player last-man-standing shooter with random loot drops and an ever-decreasing map size. The game launched on Steam Early Access in March 2017. By December, it had over three million concurrent players. Everyone took notice of Greene’s success – including Epic Games.
Fortnite was not always the battle royale you know today. When it launched in July 2017, it was a struggling tower defence game where a quartet of players scavenged and built fortifications to defend against waves of nocturnal monsters. PUBG’s meteoric success convinced Epic’s CEO and CCO, Tim Sweeney and Donald Mustard, to take a gamble on improving Fortnite’s future: they quickly tasked the team to develop their own equivalent of PlayerUnknown’s formula.
By September, the mode was released. It was barebones, practically ramshackle, with minimal assets and a bizarre application of the building systems from the original fort-crafting mode. But it had one secret weapon. Unlike PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale was free-to-play. The most popular video game idea in the world was suddenly free for all. Within 2 weeks, it hit 10 million players. Within a year, it was home to 125 million. Today, the number of registered Fortnite players sits at 650 million.
The battle royale pivot changed Fortnite forever. It isn’t even a game anymore – it’s become a platform, one where Ariana Grande and Eminem have performed virtually, previews of Star Wars movies have played, and servers worldwide were shut down to emulate a world-ending event.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/its-almost-not-worth-being-number-two-how-live-service-turned-games-into-a-battle-royale-for-the-top-spot
