Front Burner - How Fortnite blew up in 2018

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

"What Fortnite has done is break all the rules around what makes a successful video game," says Tom Power, host of CBC Radio's q. Fortnite has over 200 million registered users, and is reported to have brought in two billion dollars in profits for Epic Games this year. Since its launch in 2017, it's also become a pop culture phenomenon. So how did a free-to-play game become such a cultural and economic powerhouse? Tom Power helps us understand the game, and even teaches host Jayme Poisson how to play.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So I want you to picture this.

You're playing a video game and your character is flying on a bus. You've just landed on an island and you run towards the Tilted Towers and you start looking for supplies, ammo, weapons, potions. As one of a hundred players, you've just got one goal. Get rid of everyone else. For about 200 million people around the world, what I just described is very familiar. It's just an average night playing Fortnite Battle Royale. Oh yeah. The game was released in 2017, but it really exploded this year. And even though it's free, Fortnite has brought in $2 billion this year. So how did that even happen?

That's today on FrontBurner. Today we're doing this episode with our friends at Q. It's running on both our shows. You should listen to Q if you don't already. Grab the podcast. It's so great. Q's host Tom Power is a big Fortnite fan, and he taught me how to play the game. Or sort of. You'll see.

We are going to be in the training island. Like for beginners? No, so it's essentially where we're going to wait until we go on. Here we are. Got it. Until we get dropped in. So this is us. We're just kind of waiting around. And we're this guy with the axe? Yeah, I'm the guy with the axe.

I'm waiting around for these people. See, it's number 96 there in the corner? Yeah, yeah. That's how many people are in the game. When it gets to 100, we're going to start the game. Got it. And then we're going to enter a really big bus, and then we're going to go fly over an island.

So I just got a little gun to just, you know. So I just jumped out here randomly somewhere. See, that's the map above. Okay. That's the entire island. You jumped out of the bus? I jumped out here randomly somewhere. See, that's the map above. Okay. That's the entire island. You jumped out of the bus? I jumped out of the bus. So I'm going to try and find somewhere to go.

I usually go around here. But in about a minute or two from now, the island's going to shrink a little bit. Okay. And I'm going to need to get somewhere within the safe area. Otherwise, I'll die. So little by little, every couple of minutes, the island gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And therefore, you're more likely to be seen.

There's less room to hide. And the last person standing at the end of it in the tiniest little space is the winner of Fortnite. This feels very Hunger Games to me. It is extremely Hunger Games. Well, it's a battle royale, right? How long does this game usually last? You know, I'm going to die early, so probably won't be playing for longer than maybe 5-10 minutes. But if you win, it can last for about a half hour, 40 minutes.

But still, you're not talking about 2 or 3 hours. Do you have a map in your hand? Yeah, I have a map. I'm going to try and build something, but I don't have the wood for it yet. But I'm trying to get over to that chest. See that chest? So I'm assuming I can jump. And I can. Good. So these chests are where all the items are. You want to get as many items as you possibly can or the best items you possibly can. So right now I have a gun and I have dynamite. But what I don't want to do is use that too quickly.

It's interesting me like the world that you're playing and other video games I've seen, it's sort of more like a graphic novel style, but this is a little bit more cartoonish. Oh yeah, it's very cartoonish. But again, I think that's the appeal, because for kids it's not that it's not a super adult game. I think parents feel comfortable with people playing it.

There you go. Did you get him? Got him. Nice. So I took that guy out. Okay, and now do you get all his stuff? him? Got him. Nice. So I took that guy out. Okay, and now do you get all his stuff? Now I get all his stuff. Oh, that's sweet. You ready for this?

Yeah. I'm going to hand it over to you. Okay. I'm walking. Yeah. So you're looking around right now, but you've got to walk with that thing over there. Oh, yeah, okay. This is me shooting. Oh, wow, I just shot. You just shot. So you want to just run around a little bit.

You just threw down a knife. Watch out, you're going to kill yourself. Get out of the way, get out of the way, get out of the way. You killed yourself in like 10 seconds. How did you do that? I did not even do that. That was awful. So I want to point out, if you're listening to this,

we were doing well. We had killed somebody, which is so hard to do. You almost never get an elimination. I had felt good that I had gotten an elimination on Fortnite. And then I give it to Jamie. Jamie throws a stick of dynamite at her feet, blows herself up, and it says you eliminated yourself. But Jess, this is interesting, too. Am I going to make your stats low?

Yeah, I'm out now. Do you think anybody saw that happen? I think the Canadian public's about to see it. And you've got to be ready for that, because we're filming this. Yeah, we'm out now. Do you think anybody saw that happen? I think the Canadian public is about to see it. And you've got to be ready for that because we're filming this. Yeah, we are filming this. So, Tom. Hi, by the way. What did you think of Fortnite?

Well, I think I have some work to do. How did you get into this game? I got into Fortnite through the best way to find out about any kind of recreation or video games, which is word of mouth. Like word was going around with my friends that there was this sort of game that everyone was talking about that you could play as a battle royale. And just someone sat down and described it to me. And the nice thing about it, it was free. So I opened my PS4. There was no barrier to me getting it.

I just downloaded it and played it a couple minutes later, and immediately I was hooked. So I know you were like an early adopter to this and heard about it through word of mouth, but it feels like now this has gone just far beyond word of mouth. Like everybody has heard about this game. Like why do you think that is? Like why has it exploded? Well, the moment it kind of really caught on to a mass market was when Drake played it. It was really catching on in the underground. There were

subreddits about it. In gamer world, which as we all know is secretly probably the most lucrative media world, but it doesn't necessarily always often get reflected in mainstream media. It was doing pretty well and people were talking about it. We were all watching this guy named Ninja, or Tyler Ninja Blevins, play, who's the number one streamer in the world. He was on Twitch, the streaming platform. We were watching him live play these games. And then one night I got a text from my friend, oh my God, Drake is playing Fortnite with Ninja.

Are you a bush, Drake? Yeah. I was going to say, where are you getting that green from, man? You're looking real good. So how long have you been playing Fortnite or been a fan? Probably for about a month or two, maybe. Sam. All of a sudden, we all, people, not just Fortnite fans, but hip hop fans, music fans,

weird Twitter pop culture fans, because Drake commands such a wide audience, just different audiences. We tune in to Travis Scott, to Drake, and to Ninja all playing Fortnite. And I think that was really kind of the moment that it exploded. And so you're watching them on Twitch, the like YouTube like... YouTube but live. You know, it's interesting to me to now see this game, it's becoming popular with younger people. So like I know that we talked about that when we were playing, that it looks a little bit different than other games that have sort of that graphic novel feel or are very much, you know, feel like a realistic like war. Well, they're simulations.

They're meant to simulate a war or meant to simulate a sports game. But with Fortnite, it's certainly cartoonish. There's funny pink axes. There's funny costumes you can buy. You can dress up like a cow. You can dress up like an astronaut. I think that's definitely great for young kids who, you know, and I think parents feel good about them playing it because, again, you don't actually – it's not as bloody. You don't actually kill anybody.

You just kind of knock them down. You know, it's less violent in that way, even though it is quite violent. But also for people like me, I'm not someone who really wants to feel beaten down and with a real serious game at the end of the day. I just want to have a bit of fun. So they call me casuals, like arcade players. It was fun for people like me too. So how often will you play? So I haven't been playing as much these days, but before I was probably putting in, after my show, I would come home and do my homework for the next day, and I'd probably play like an hour, an hour and a half. There's been a lot of coverage about how this game is addictive.

Yeah. So there are teachers that are complaining that kids can't get off it in class. I mean, because you can play from any console. You can play from like a computer, for example. You can play from your phone. You can play from your phone. And there are parents who are now talking about needing to send their kids to rehab because of this game.

Yeah, I mean, it can be quite addictive because the games themselves last four or five minutes. Fort of Fortnite is also trying to build, trying to build these gigantic structures as fast as you possibly can to try and hide out. So then when you have people like the Vancouver Canucks banning the game from the road, when you have the Red Sox pitcher David Price getting carpal tunnel and people think it's because of Fortnite, you have a report saying 5% of British divorces coming from Fortnite.

5%, yeah. I think it's because it has a steep learning curve. You can get pretty good quickly, but it takes a little while to get really great at it. But you do feel better every single time you play it. This game now has 200 million registered users. It's crazy. And in August alone, it attracted 80 million players. And it just launched in 2017. And it's reported to have brought in over a billion dollars, which is insane. And it's reported to have brought in over a billion dollars, which is insane. But also it's insane because it's free.

So let's talk about the business model. How does this game make money? What I find really interesting about that is that the only thing you can really spend money on are these things called battle passes and skins, right? So battle passes, you pay $20, $30 every now and then, a couple of seasons a year, so maybe $60 a year. And all you really get is a couple of different skins. Skins are the costumes you can wear, different axes, different—when you fall out of the bus, which we did, I could have a different cloud behind me. I could have a different series of dances that I can do. But none of these things make me better at the game.

And it's purely aesthetic, the thing that you pay for. But the way that Fortnite makes money is a lot more than just from inside the game. They have these cross-branding deals with companies like the NFL. I know at one point you could put on an NFL jersey and wear that as a skin. And Marvel. So at one point, even Thanos from the Avengers was a character. I would have joined Fortnite solely to play with Thanos in the game. I feel like I'm being a bit squeezed out of Fortnite, though, to be honest. As it's taken on more and more young people playing it, those of us who are in our 30s who have jobs, who have daily radio shows, we can't plug in the time necessary for kids in grade five and six and seven who

are able to put five and six hours into this thing every single day. So we're not getting any better at the game. Right. And the level of expertise has been going up. You know what this sounds like to me is someone who's trying to make excuses for being constantly beaten by kids in grade five and six. Sounds to me like a poor craftsman blaming his tools. Yeah.

I'm with you. So back to these sort of cross-promotional deals. I talked to Patrick O'Rourke. He works for Mobile Sierra. He covers video games. And he talks about how this was like a really good marketing move. Thanos became a playable character within Fortnite for a very limited period of time. There's a bit of a backlash from players where they felt that it was imbalanced.

But that's kind of the beauty of how Fortnite does these timed events is that they're not permanent. This isn't something that's going to be in the game forever. It's like a fun little Easter egg that's there for a limited period of time. And if players don't like it, Epic can just take it away. And that's what happened in this case. But also, I'm sure Disney shelled out some amount of money to have Thanos featured in the game because that's good advertising from Disney's perspective. There's definitely a fluidity to the changing of the game that keeps it really interesting. One of the things that I've seen this game do that I've never seen any other game do is they'll have a meteor shower happen at like 8 o'clock on a Sunday night. And it'll go all over the internet that this meteor shower is going to happen.

So everyone will just log into the game at the same time and everyone will be able to see the meteor shower. I didn't even know stuff like that was possible. The idea that you'll get a text and say Thanos is in the game right now, you don't know how long that's going to last. Typically, historically, when you bought a video game, it would stay the same for the duration that you bought it. Right.

It's a really interesting model that the game is ultimately free, but they keep on adding things to it. Okay, so what about the dances? I want to talk about the dances in Fortnite. Oh, the dances. Yeah, they've become a really important part of Fortnite, so strangely, because all they originally were was essentially like what you can do is in the game if you press the control pad as opposed to the control stick you can dance you can choose a dance and you end up dancing uh typically to mock somebody or because you can't hear one another in the game like a stranger you dance to sort of communicate and I know that there's also been some legal trouble with these dances it started with the rapper 2Milly. trouble with these dances. It started with the rapper 2Milly.

The dances in the game are actual dances. They're dances that are, you know, from the internet. They're dances that you know from, you know, from Vine, from YouTube. And he says that Fortnite took his dance, Milly Rock. And now Carlton from The Fresh Prince is suing the company for the dance moves that he made up on that game. You know when he's like snapping his fingers? Were you ever prepared for a moment in your journalistic career where you would say this sentence?

The guy who played Carlton on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is suing the video game company Epic Games. I'm sitting here with you and we're talking about Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This is exactly what I was picturing. But it is true. Alfonso Ribeiro, who played Carlton on The Fresh Prince,

he had that It's Not Unusual snappy dance. It's not unusual to be loved by anyone. It's not unusual to be loved by anyone. As well as Russell Horning, who's the backpack kid. The kid took the stage as Katy Perry performed and in about two seconds took over the show. He came up with the flossing. I don't know, this is me sounding like I'm 150 years old. No, the backpack, he was doing it with Katy Perry.

Yeah, exactly. So he's suing the company over his signature dance, the floss. And, you know, artistically, it's extremely hard to trademark choreography because there have to be a certain number of moves in order for it to be considered a dance that you can then trademark. And these moves only have a few. Sometimes with the floss, it's only

one movement. That's not the only issue that's come up with this game. When Fortnite first came out, you had to kind of make a decision between whether you were going to play Fortnite or you were going to play PUBG, Player Unknown Battleground, which was another Battle Royale style game. It was made famous when Deadmau5, the great Canadian DJ, played it on Twitch. He sort of popularized it. And again, the lawsuit said that PUBG originally came up with this Battle Royale concept first. Fortnite copied it, made a lot more money. The

lawsuit was dropped. So the PUBG lawsuit was dropped, but Patrick O'Rourke says it raises some interesting questions. Video game genres or game types aren't really something that's copyrighted. There's a lot of games that fall into different genres. And Epic really did take that concept and did something unique with it. It offers a much more polished experience than what PUBG does. But then you could also look at it from the perspective of, like, they totally stole that idea. I mean, in a way, maybe Fortnite just did more with it than PUBG did. Yeah, isn't that always the way?

Like, for every NSYNC, there's, like, a new kid on the block. Well, the iPhone was made with military technology. I like my analogy better. Yeah, is it better? Yeah, here it is. You know, this idea that Epic was able to take this Battle Royale idea and just blow it up really kind of brings us to this company which is so interesting epic games epic games it's based in uh north carolina it's a u.s company founded by tim sweeney its ceo who founded this company in his parents basement he um is an avid conservationist

so he's actually not a big video game player and not, you know, the kind of CEO that like surrounds himself with tons of flashy things. Like he prefers Burger King over fine dining. What's that term they use? Champagne taste and Coca-Cola income? I feel like he has a Coca-Cola taste and with a champagne income. Even though he's like a full billionaire. Right. However, I'm not surprised to hear that the guy behind it or the guy behind Epic is not a typical video game developer because really what Fortnite did is broken all of the rules of what is meant to be a successful video game. So this is obviously someone who cares about quote unquote community. This is a guy who thinks outside the box of typical video game entrepreneurs. The thing about Fortnite is, is that it's community based. Not only are me and my friends playing it every single night,

but kids on the playground are playing it every single night. It's not about trying to beat the next level or trying to get the next task. It's about spending time together, some friendly competition. It's not too violent. It's not too gory. I'm not surprised that it was created by someone who thinks a little bit outside the box. Tom, thank you so much. So do you think that I can come play now with you and your friends? I think 100% you can sit in your living room while I sit in my living room and my friends sit in their living rooms and we all play together, but we pretend to have a social life. That sounds perfect.

Happy holidays. Happy holidays to you. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. And on a personal note, I have now set up my own Fortnite account. So I promise that the next time we play, I'm going to be a lot better. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay girl gone. Available now.