Posted by With the release of Fortnite season 4, I got to thinking about why this game, and the battle royale genre for that matter, has become so popular. I personally don’t play the game, but I have friends, classmates, and even family members that play Fortnite on a daily basis, and YouTube is just flooded with Fortnite videos. But why is this?
Looking back, the battle royale genre really started to become popular when The Hunger Games started to become popular. That’s also when the Minecraft Hunger Games started. I remember watching YouTube video of people playing Minecraft, specifically these battle royale modes, for hours. Soon other battle royale mods began to circulate in games like ARMA. One of the first battle royale games that was entirely built around this concept was The Culling, however, PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds soon eclipsed The Culling. PUBG quickly became ludicrously popular, but it too was eclipsed, this time by Fortnite. But again the question surfaces; why?
The short answer is glory. People enjoy winning and hate losing, so they compete against others to be the last one standing. The same thing can be said about any multiplayer mode in a game. In team deathmatch, you want your team to win and get more kills. In free-for-all, you want to beat everyone and get the most kills the fastest. Battle royale games are the most extreme end of this “winning spectrum”. In a battle royale, every fight could be your last, whereas in most other game modes, you can respawn and try again. Because of this, being the last one standing is so satisfying in battle royale games. But at the same time, there are drawbacks that make the game both worse and better. Since all of the items are randomly generated, every game will be different in some way, shape, or form. This endless variety would allow the game to never get old. Take Destiny 2 for example; the only content worth doing becomes stale and repetitive very quickly, because there’s no variety. But at the same time, this random loot generating in battle royale games can be obnoxious. It could come down to the very end and you have respectable weapons but no healing items, and your opponent has everything that you don’t. This luck factor can lead to some really stupid games. Of course you can win with lower tier weapons and items, but it isn’t as easy. Plus there’s always the chance that you get a high tier rarity weapon but in practicality it’s low tier, thereby putting you at a disadvantage. Death can be swift, and annoying, but people still try because the next game might be the one they win. That’s why people play battle royale games; for the glory.
But what makes one battle royale game so different from the others? In PUBG you can drive cars; in Fortnite you can build; in Paladins (because they have a battle royale mode now) you play as a hero with set abilities. Every battle royale game is different, but these differences aren’t always the reason that they’re popular. Fortnite is free. If you had to pay for it, it may not be remotely as successful as it is now, but because it’s free, literally everyone can play it. Fortnite is on practically every console (and with everything being ported over to the Nintendo Switch I wouldn’t be surprised is Fortnite ended up on it sooner or later), and it’s even on mobile devices. PUBG is also on all of the same platforms that Fortnite is, but it has a price tag attached to it. Why pay thirty bucks for one game when you can play a similar game that gets updated more for free. And as obvious as it sounds, Fortnite’s success is due to its popularity. If the game had a smaller player base, it probably wouldn’t be updated as much, because the developers would be more focused on the single player mode while occasionally updating the multiplayer, but because Fortnite is so popular, there’s practically something new every week, whether it’s a skin, a weapon, a location, etc. All of this content feeds the cycle and makes people play the game more, because they gotta grind for that battle pass skin.
Still, battle royale games are not for everyone. I understand their appeal, but they personally don’t appeal to me. And I’m not discrediting the games or saying that they’re bad, I just don’t enjoy playing them. If I play a multiplayer game, I like being able to respawn, so game modes with one life (search and destroy in Call of Duty or Rainbow Six Siege in general) just aren’t fun for me, but to each his own.
There’s no denying that battle royale games are the hottest trend right now, heck there are tons of rumors about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 having a battle royale mode. And battle royale games will continue to grow in popularity for a while, so it’s interesting to look back and see why this trend started and what is contributing to its success.
Broad Scope Entertainment 