Fortnite was released back in 2017, and the game immediately blew up. Attracting millions of players, Fortnite’s growth was surprising and took the gaming community by a storm (pun intended). It didn’t look like Fortnite’s growth would stop anytime soon. But at the same time, many critics said that this fame was only temporary and Fortnite wouldn’t last long. The five years of Fortnite’s reign begs the question, Is Fortnite Dead?
The Impact Of No Build Gamemode
Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, noticed that the player base was getting bored of the game. The building mechanics in Fortnite were very difficult to master, which is why it became difficult for newer or less experienced players to have fun in the game.
The casual players who just wanted to play Fortnite for fun were only getting more and more frustrated by the game. This is because the sweaty players who spent hours every day playing Fortnite were difficult to beat, which took the fun out of Fortnite.
So in an attempt to make Fortnite fun again, Epic Games released the No Build mode as a limited-time game mode. This was received well by the Fortnite community! Players started to enjoy Fortnite again because the sweatiness of building was removed from the equation.
The game mode received so much positive feedback, in fact, that Epic Games decided to keep it permanently in the game. Players can now find the No Build mode as a part of the regular game modes playlist in Fortnite.
Players Are Leaving Fortnite?
In the last year or two, it can be seen that some of the biggest Fortnite content creators and players have left the game to explore other gaming titles. Twitch streamers like Nickmercs, Tfue, SypherPK, and Ninja who owe a large share of their popularity to Fortnite, stopped playing the game regularly simply because it had gotten extremely repetitive and boring.
During one of his Fortnite steams, Ninja said, “I’m just starting to play Fortnite again. I haven’t played in months. Honestly, the game wasn’t fun to me. It was super stale and super boring. I mean, I honestly don’t have anything good to say about Fortnite in the last two seasons,”
As these streamers and Fortnite content creators moved away from the game, they also took hundreds of thousands of viewers with them.
Fortnite Tournaments
Many Fortnite Tournaments are being held regularly, but their views and coverage have seemed to gown quite a bit over time. For example, in 2020, a Fortnite tournament was held, with a prize pool of over $5 million! But despite this prize, it wasn’t publicized that much.
Statistics
If we look at the recent FNCS player base Statistics, we can see that there were a total of 6186 teams competing in the NA East Region in the first qualifier of Chapter 3, Season 2. Now, this number doesn’t seem that bad till you see that there were over 16,000 teams that competed in Season 1 of the same chapter!
Here is a list of the number of players that competed in the qualifiers every season from Chapter 2, Season 5:
- C2S5 – 12,372
- C2S6 – 24,012
- C2S7 – 50,064
- C2S8 – 10,428
- C3S1 – 32,320
- C3S2 – 12,372
Fortnite Chapter 2 wasn’t performing all that well because of the lack of regular updates and no changes to the map. This is why the majority of Fortnite players had the same complaint that the game had become extremely boring.
The release of Chapter 3 was very beneficial to Fortnite as it brought new updates, changes, and game modes to the game. The number of players in Fortnite increased, and FNCS tripled! Even Fortnite content creators started getting more views!
Some Issues Fortnite Faces
Separate Casual And Competitive Loot
If there’s something Epic Games loves to do in Fortnite is to add new and unique items. Every season, a bunch of new items and mechanics are added to the game, disrupting the meta and changing the game’s play style. The last addition of such items was seen at the beginning of Chapter 3 when Spiderman’s grappling gloves were added to the game.
These gloves were extremely fun, and everyone enjoyed using them except for the competitive players. These gloves gave an unfair movement advantage to the players who could find them. And this isn’t just one single issue. Instead, it is a part of a major issue that has been ongoing in Fortnite, which is that Epic refuses to separate the Casual and Competitive Loot Pools in Fortnite properly.
Players have constantly requested to make the loot in Fortnite competitive game modes fairer to allow the players to have less of an advantage over others based on their loot. And although we do acknowledge that Epic has made some effort towards this, there is still a spray and pray meta in the competitive mode that needs changing.
Competition
However responsible Fortnite may be for its decline, we cannot completely blame the game and its creators for it. The truth is that Fortnite has higher competition in the gaming market than ever. Newer games have been released, and more are expected to come out very soon.
Conclusion
When Fortnite came out, it was a breath of fresh air for the gamers who were tired of playing games like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds all the time. This is because all these games were more or less similar to each other. Players wanted something new, and Fortnite gave it to them.
But now we can see games like Warzone take over the gaming scene, and rightfully so. It is a great game with more refined mechanics and is once again a breath of fresh air for the gamers.
Many streamers like SypherPK and Nickmercs have chosen Call of Duty Warzone as their primary game. When these streamers switch to another game, they take their fans and viewers with them, who in turn also start playing the same game.
