The Fortnite 'Defense' mechanism: Epic Games' tactic to stay on top of the Battle Royale genre

Regardless of whether you are a fan of the game or not, one thing is for certain; Fortnite is a unique game. It has combined elements of different gaming genres to create a special game which is fit for people of virtually all ages. This is something that the game’s usage statistics have proven, time and again.

In 2018, the game had garnered a whopping $2.4 billion. While that figure was driven down to around $1.9 billion in 2019, that is hardly a reason to complain. As of April 2020, the game had a total of 350 million registered users across platform!

Image Credits: Epic Games

Regardless, users in the past have pointed out a rather uncanny tactic that Epic Games has been seen to follow in the past. It seems that Epic games has been guilty of deliberately timing their updates so as to clash with some of its competitors. In this article, we look at whether the claims bear any truth.

The Fortnite ‘Defense’ mechanism: Epic Game’s uncanny tactic to stay on top

Firstly, we go back a couple of years, when in April 2019 Fortnite was arguably at the peak of its powers. Here, we saw the release of Apex Legends. The game was developed by Respawn Entertainment, published by EA, and had around 50 million users by the end of the first month!

Image Credits: ea.com

Epic Games responded on multiple fronts. Firstly, the Fortnite World Cup was announced, with a $30 million prize pool within weeks of the release. Next, according to fortnitenews.com, Epic paid to have targeted ads at users searching for Apex Legends online!

Further, in February, as part of Fortnite’s ‘Share The Love’ event, we saw Epic quadrupling its Support a Creator payouts. The same month Epic offered Fortnite’s Season 8 Battle Pass for free. All players had to do was complete a series of 13 challenges to procure it. Further events including two ‘double XP’ events, as well as a few features that were eerily similar to Apex Legends were also added to the game. This included Reboot vans, and the ping system.

Image Credits: dexerto.com

Moving on to more recent times, we saw Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Season 5 release on the 5th of this month. Well, Epic Games released their blockbuster feature of the season ie. cars, on the same date. What makes it peculiar is the fact that cars were for more than a month rumored to be released on the 21st of July.

Image Credits: Epicgames.com

However, we saw a rather frustrating set of delays, after which they were finally released on the 5th of August. While these incidents might as well be mere coincidences to a great extent, the release of cars on the same day as COD: Modern Warfare Season 5 did have a range of benefits.. Regardless, as they say, what isn’t broken doesn’t need fixing, although there are some others things that Fortnite developers need to fix, according to their fans.