Upon their original reveal back in 2011, Epic Games presented Fortnite as an upcoming co-op shooter focused on survival. The build mechanics and guns were aspects of base building in order to survive a world ravaged by undead and enemies. This mode was known as Fortnite: Save the World. Then, in a stroke of presumed brilliance, they decided to make a marketing campaign to get more players on Fortnite and make them want to check out the actual game; they released the free-to-play Battle Royale multiplayer mode of the game.

The point of this multiplayer mode was to show off the mechanics of the game, get more players looking into what the game has to offer, and then hopefully they would purchase the actual Save the World campaign. However, the reception to the free-to-play mode was much different than they expected… In fact, it was substantially more successful than they even remotely anticipated!

It only took the first year of the game being in an early beta stage for the numbers to show the true colors of what players wanted. Battle Royale continued to spike and grow while Save the World began to dwindle with only a small fraction of the general player base showing interest in it. It even got to the point that when news would drop that an update, roadmap, or patch notes were released for the game and players found out the majority of it was surrounding the Save the World side of Fortnite, Epic Games would get backlash from the majority of the player base.

Long story short, the development team’s attention shifted from completing the campaign to improving the Battle Royale even further.

Fast forward to today, Fortnite is one of the most successful, ongoing multiplayer games available to play and it is still completely free on all major platforms with cross-play and the works. All DLC coming out for the game are essentially cosmetics for player’s and they maintain interest through wild events, unique moments, and new, limited-time mechanics that change the gameplay up just enough. So, how could it possibly be a failed title in any sense if it is so successful?

It’s simple, the marketing for the game was the definition of the phrase ‘failing upwards.’ The original plan was to just get more players on the game while they finished the Save the World campaign but they ended up pushing back the development of the campaign and just released it from its early access version in June 2020. With barely any announcement of the PvE campaign mode being released and becoming the side project of the games overall development, many players only play, or likely even know of, the ever-popular Battle Royale experience. Whether this is a good or bad thing, it goes to show that you never know what to expect when an idea takes off!

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