Fornite: Games Changer? (Premium)

Fornite wasn't the first "battle royale"-style video game, but it is certainly the most popular. Given its success, has Fornite changed gaming forever? Or is it just a flash in the pan?

Those questions may seem unfair. After all, the game was first released only 9 months ago, and it is competing against established franchises that have decades of success and fan acceptance to fall back on.

But Fortnite is already a wake-up call for the rest of the industry. This disruptive force has quickly brushed aside its erstwhile battle royale competition, like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG). And more important, it is already impacting more established shooters. Including Call of Duty, the market leader, whose next installment, Black Ops 4, will include, for the first time, a battle royale mode of its own.

Part of Fornite's appeal, I suppose, is a perfect mix of price, which is free, and availability, which is near-universal. Today, it is available on Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and iOS. And it's about to get even bigger when the Android port, expected in the second half of 2018, hits.

The graphics help, too. Where PUBG is held back by realistic but experimental and slow-moving graphics, Fornite provides a high-quality cartoon look---think high-end Disney or Pixar cartoon---that, to me, is moreOverwatch than PUBG (or COD). It looks great, but it also plays well. And it suffers from none of the performance issues that dogs PUGB, especially on Xbox.

From a gameplay perspective, Fornite seems derivative. It's a battle royale game, after all, where the fight continues until only one player is left. But it also steals elements directly from other games, like PUBG. Like the island setting that you parachute (or, in Fornite, glide) into and the constantly-shrinking playfield that brings the remaining players ever closer to each other.

That complaint is a bit simplistic, however. Fornite also expands on the PUBG formula by adding a vaguely Minecraft-like resource collection and fortification building element. And while other games, like COD, can add battle royale-like modes in the future, Fornite is perhaps ideally suited to handle the massive numbers of players that compete simultaneously on the same map.

Which brings me to what I think is the ultimate genius of this game, it's embrace of the e-sports phenomena. The first-ever professional Fornite tournament was held at this past week's E3 conference with a prize pool valued at $3 million. And Epic, the game's maker, has pledged $100,000,000 to Fortnite e-sports competitions through 2019.

E-sports still confuses some people. But I feel like e-sports will eventually outshine traditional professional sports in every way imaginable. And that a future generation will spend more time and money watching these virtual games than they will watching athletes competing in games like football and basketball. And unlike with traditional sports, more pe...