Battle Royale Video Games
In today’s day and age, video games are one of the most prominent sources of media across the globe, on the Internet and in our everyday lives. You probably know of games like Mario and Minecraft and may have even played them. However, there is a new game that has quickly risen to prominence over the past few months: Fortnite. The game was released in September of 2017 by developer Epic Games, and it quickly gained popularity, both among the gaming community and beyond. Since then, the game has become intertwined with many aspects of our lives—music, popular culture, dance, social media, television—and has earned its reputation as one of the most successful games in recent years.
What many do not know is that this game is part of a much larger video game genre called battle royale. The category is vastly inspired by The Hunger Games, a trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins. The books chronicle a group of children isolated in an arena who are forced to fight to the death until only one remains. The battle royale genre replicates this idea by having each player drop onto an island (usually from a plane) and quickly find weapons to eliminate all other players. Games like Minecraft have included battle royale-style events within the wider gaming interface for a while.
In the last three years, though, the genre has resurfaced from games like H1Z1, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), and Fortnite. These games expanded on the idea by constantly adding new gear, “powerups” and different modes over time to make the game more interesting and up to date. The gameplay style allows gamers to participate in hundreds of games, each one different from the last. This means that there are technically unlimited possibilities for gameplay, so players are rarely bored with the game. The fact that only one player can claim victory per match also creates an appealing reward system for players, and as a result, they keep competing until they win.
Fortnite is so popular that it has garnered over 200 million players around the world and has made an estimated $2.4 billion since it's launch. This record amount of profit made it the top-grossing free-to-play game in the world and helped Epic Games’ net worth to reach $8 billion. Since its release, Fortnite has also hosted tournaments, featured cross-over events with companies like Marvel and attracted the attention of many famous faces like artists Drake, Marshmello and Travis Scott.
The game doesn’t have all good reviews, though—its close relationship with popular dances has led several celebrities, including rapper BlocBoy JB, to file lawsuits against Epic Games. JB is currently suing the company over the use of his dance moves in Fortnite without his approval. Despite the controversies over the use of various artists’ work in the game, Fortnite has kept its position as a giant in the videogame industry and has inspired the birth of a multitude of other similar games.
After the world witnessed Fortnite’s rise to fame, many of the gaming industry’s top developers decided to follow suit with their own battle royale games. Well-known multiplayer game franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield added their own takes on battle royale to their latest video games in an effort to compete with Fortnite’s monopoly on the genre.
Upper James Long attributes the wide-scale production of these new battle royale-style games to Fortnite’s innovative design and its subsequent influence on popular culture. “Fortnite is one of the biggest out-of-nowhere successes in gaming history. Its success has made battle royale games the dominant multiplayer game style, as opposed to former team-based games like Overwatch and other first-person shooters.” Call of Duty’s Blackout mode (a form of battle royale gameplay) was released in the fall of 2018 and gained a large fanbase after launch, many considering it a more realistic version of Fortnite with the feel of the Call of Duty franchise.
Another recent success was Apex Legends, a game released by Respawn Entertainment this past February. The game was a “surprise release,” and it accumulated over 25 million followers in just a few days. It added a whole new dimension to the battle royale genre, building off of the class-based team play of already-popular games like Overwatch. While none of these other games have quite been able to reach the popularity and widespread success of Fortnite, the competition for the number one battle royale game continues to unfold. Fortnite and Apex Legends have an advantage as they are both free-to-play games that make their money from in-game purchases rather than an initial cost, but it remains to be seen if one of these new takes on battle royale will dethrone Fortnite.
Personally—although I do enjoy battle royale games—they are nowhere near my favorite type of game. I prefer traditional multiplayer games like first-person shooters. However, today’s popular games are shifting more and more to being completely online multiplayers, as seen by the rise of battle royale games. People prefer to just stay at home and play with their friends online rather than in the same room—a more social gameplay method made popular by Nintendo through games like MarioKart.
Of all of the battle royale games out there, I enjoy Blackout the most because of its similarity to the traditional Call of Duty that I grew up playing and also because of its reliance on real-life tactics and strategy to win. I played Fortnite for a while as well, but the play style was too foreign to me, and I quickly became tired of it. Fortnite is tailored more for the younger generation with its funny animations, music and dances, and it will shape the gaming style that they will grow up with. Overall, the new wave of battle royale games have truly revolutionized gaming and undoubtedly had long-lasting effects on the culture surrounding gamers everywhere.