> What this means is that, unlike so many other gaming trends, Fortnite truly seems like it's here to stay. According to Google searches, Fortnite has a ways to go to reach the staggering highs of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game that became a huge phenomenon throughout the summer of 2016.
The argument is that Fortnite is not a fad, and then it's immediately compared to one of the biggest gaming fads in recent memory? And it isn't quite as popular as that fad? Okay.
> “More people in the U.S. are searching for ‘Fortnite’ on Google than they are for ‘Reddit’ and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company.
What a genius comparison! Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
> Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
It seems to me that googling for a popular site like reddit is actually pretty common. A couple of reasons:
1. Because google is often much better at returning relevant results for site:<site>.com <query> than searching for <query> in the site's search engine. I would think this to be the case even more so for types of sites like reddit simply because of such high total post / word count. In fact, brand recognition would seem to be more of a reason for people to google it. E.g. If you want to read a wikipedia article on some topic, you normally wouldn't visit wikipedia.org first to use its search, you'd google "wikipedia <topic>" or "site:wikipedia.org <topic>".
2. To avoid hitting enter after a typo and ending up on some malware site <domain with typo>.com.
This article is idiotic. The assertion seems to be based entirely off Google Trends and "supported" by a quote from someone with a professional relationship to the author that just says they "believe" it might be true.
Google Trends is almost completely meaningless for both judging the popularity of a game, and the popularity of sites like reddit or Amazon.
Games follow a trendline like te^-rt where t is time and r dependent on the game. The reason is simple. When a person learns of some piece of content (game, meme, whatever) there is some probability they share it with one or more people. If on average each person exposed shares with more than one person then you get an exponential explosion (aka virality). But sharing content with people who have already seen it is redundant. Eventually the average new people shared with per person exposed becomes less than one and the exponential growth becomes exponential decay. Content where r is large explode quickly and die quickly (blue/black dress). Content where r is just barely greater than 0 have a slow rise and slow decline.
The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft. The reason is that the r value is small enough that population growth during the games lifetime is non-negligible.
Minecraft is Lego-style self-directed play, completely unlike most video games.
If you watch, say the Direwolf20 series on Age Of Engineering, he ends up building this huge space station to win. But, that space station was his idea, not a requirement, my play of AoE has a tiny airless platform with a warp drive in it for space exploration and my main base was in the open air in a parallel universe where it never rains. He spends lots of time building structures in low gravity wearing a jetpack, I spent more fencing off wildlife. This wasn't a choice explicitly offered in the game, just a consequence of different people with the same infinite box of Lego bricks building a different layout. The very different experiences mean essentially infinite replay value.
"Random" sandbox elements became very popular in video games, but QA teams militate against building anything like Minecraft where you just can't test because there's a combinatorial explosion of interactions. Instead most games have a handful of set pieces with inconsequential random elements.
But that means even if nobody else's game of Shadow of Mordor is exactly the same, they're so similar as to preclude most interest in replaying. Which makes good economic sense, sell the player a new one every year. But you don't become a phenomenon like Minecraft that way.
I'm sort of confused by what these games bring to the table that is novel and such a revolutionary improvement over what came before. My FPS playing days are long over, but battle royale games seem like super beefy Counter Strike or Quake Arena servers, to my ignorant eyes. I'm pretty sure 100+ player Quake World games would have been awesome, if the hardware and network connections of the time could have kept up.
You know what else was a fad...I mean cultural phenomenon? The Wii.
This is great for gaming. Fortnite has driven twitch viewers to crazy new heights and while most of them will never come back (check wii sales against the most popular game franchises on the Wii’s sales) some percentage will have found their new thing and the ecosystem will be stronger for having weathered the crashing wave.
PUBG is a terrible implementation with textures and assets purchased off the unreal store. PUBG piggybacked off the popularity of H1Z1 and took off because it was slightly better. Fortnite, although cartoony, is by large and far the most stable and most competitive battle Royale out there. Epic's update pipeline and developer blogs are phenomenal, especially compared to Bluehole. PUBG performs worse in it's current state than when it did pre-release.
PUBG is almost exactly like its predecessors, so I don't know how you can level "shameless clone" at Fortnite that has the whole building mechanic.
That was a big risk compared to PUBG's conservative and incremental iteration on the existing genre.
Though these Fortnite vs PUBG arguments sure sound like the Xbox vs PS3 forum debates back in the day... I was always thankful that I didn't encounter them on HN.
[+] [-] d23|8 years ago|reply
> What this means is that, unlike so many other gaming trends, Fortnite truly seems like it's here to stay. According to Google searches, Fortnite has a ways to go to reach the staggering highs of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game that became a huge phenomenon throughout the summer of 2016.
The argument is that Fortnite is not a fad, and then it's immediately compared to one of the biggest gaming fads in recent memory? And it isn't quite as popular as that fad? Okay.
> “More people in the U.S. are searching for ‘Fortnite’ on Google than they are for ‘Reddit’ and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company.
What a genius comparison! Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.
[+] [-] decisiveness|8 years ago|reply
It seems to me that googling for a popular site like reddit is actually pretty common. A couple of reasons:
1. Because google is often much better at returning relevant results for site:<site>.com <query> than searching for <query> in the site's search engine. I would think this to be the case even more so for types of sites like reddit simply because of such high total post / word count. In fact, brand recognition would seem to be more of a reason for people to google it. E.g. If you want to read a wikipedia article on some topic, you normally wouldn't visit wikipedia.org first to use its search, you'd google "wikipedia <topic>" or "site:wikipedia.org <topic>".
2. To avoid hitting enter after a typo and ending up on some malware site <domain with typo>.com.
[+] [-] Yhippa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Deimorz|8 years ago|reply
Google Trends is almost completely meaningless for both judging the popularity of a game, and the popularity of sites like reddit or Amazon.
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|8 years ago|reply
The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft. The reason is that the r value is small enough that population growth during the games lifetime is non-negligible.
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
If you watch, say the Direwolf20 series on Age Of Engineering, he ends up building this huge space station to win. But, that space station was his idea, not a requirement, my play of AoE has a tiny airless platform with a warp drive in it for space exploration and my main base was in the open air in a parallel universe where it never rains. He spends lots of time building structures in low gravity wearing a jetpack, I spent more fencing off wildlife. This wasn't a choice explicitly offered in the game, just a consequence of different people with the same infinite box of Lego bricks building a different layout. The very different experiences mean essentially infinite replay value.
"Random" sandbox elements became very popular in video games, but QA teams militate against building anything like Minecraft where you just can't test because there's a combinatorial explosion of interactions. Instead most games have a handful of set pieces with inconsequential random elements.
But that means even if nobody else's game of Shadow of Mordor is exactly the same, they're so similar as to preclude most interest in replaying. Which makes good economic sense, sell the player a new one every year. But you don't become a phenomenon like Minecraft that way.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ioquatix|8 years ago|reply
Can you clarify?
Is the following an example of an instance of that curve?
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: To phrase it more bluntly:
"The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft."
... is mistaken. Mario is the most obvious counterexample, but there are dozens of others.
[+] [-] hux_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwnspace|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eindiran|8 years ago|reply
* monthly active users -- 130 million as of late 2017[1] to Fortnite's 45 million total players as of March.
* maxed concurrent users[2] -- 7.5 million to 3.4 million.
* monthly revenue[3].
While I think LoL is losing ground to Fortnite and PUBG, they have a way left to go to supersede it.
[1] Notably, Riot hasn't released new numbers since, so its possible that monthly actives for LoL has shrunk in Q1 2018.
[2] https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-battle-royale-pla...
[3] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-03-superdata-...
[+] [-] megaman22|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|8 years ago|reply
This is the (analyst) data everyone is citing: https://www.superdataresearch.com/us-digital-games-market/
[+] [-] legionof7|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuwze|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purple-again|8 years ago|reply
This is great for gaming. Fortnite has driven twitch viewers to crazy new heights and while most of them will never come back (check wii sales against the most popular game franchises on the Wii’s sales) some percentage will have found their new thing and the ecosystem will be stronger for having weathered the crashing wave.
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
You do know that the Wii actually "won" it's generation in terms of unit sales?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_c...
And the Switch is now closing in on the Xbone...
Not exactly what I would call a "fad".
[+] [-] kaishiro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobajeff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischen|8 years ago|reply
1) Barely ahead of PUBG in unique players despite being free to play and PUBG costing $30
2) Shameless clone of PUBG
The cultural phenomenon is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Fornite is riding on the hype by being free to play.
[+] [-] cdurth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] always_good|8 years ago|reply
That was a big risk compared to PUBG's conservative and incremental iteration on the existing genre.
Though these Fortnite vs PUBG arguments sure sound like the Xbox vs PS3 forum debates back in the day... I was always thankful that I didn't encounter them on HN.
[+] [-] petercooper|8 years ago|reply
Which itself is often called a clone of H1Z1. Which in turn was inspired by DayZ..
[+] [-] jahvo|8 years ago|reply