Fortnite was a pure PvE game with the “Save the World” mode when it was released and then brought its free Battle Royale – the rest is video game history. The hype was insane. The important BR mode was set up in just a few weeks.
Ed Zobrist was Fortnite’s Head of Publishing in 2017. He was fully involved in the decisions at the time and had to think of ways and means of bringing the colorful new game to the people.
At the Game Developer Conference 2018, Zobrist gave a talk about Fortnite titled “An Unconventional Release”. It talked about the marketing methods of the competing studios at the time and how Fortnite wanted to find other ways.
But it was also about the big Battle Royale of Fortnite. Because that’s exactly what most players of the colorful shooter know and love. Zobrist explains that something completely different was actually planned for Fortnite’s PvP mode and how they threw all plans overboard within 2 weeks.
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10 weeks for one of the biggest hypes in gaming
In his lecture, Zobrist mainly talks about the release of “Rettet die Welt”. This was Fortnite’s original PvE mode, which gave birth to Battle Royale.
It was precisely this mode that they wanted to expand with a PvP mode – a game within a game. The Unreal team at Epic Games took responsibility for this.
This team developed the Battle Royale (BR) in just 10 weeks from the release of “Save the World” on July 21, 2017. On September 26, BR went online and hit like a bomb.
It was not even intended as a Free2Play version. It was only 2 weeks before the BR release that it was decided to bring the Battle Royale as a “standalone”, which ran via the Fortnite launcher, but is itself completely free – in contrast to “Save the World”.
Zobrist says the Epic Games marketing team has been working hard for those two weeks – no weekends, little rest.
The result is one of the biggest hypes in gaming history. At the beginning of November 2017, the Fortnite Battle Royale reached 20 million players. Reports today speak of over 400 million registered players (via businessofapps.com).
If you would like to watch the complete English lecture for yourself, you can find the corresponding video here:
According to Zobrist, the battle royale also meant that the game was made much more fun and no longer wanted to be taken so seriously. The mode once turned Fortnite completely to the left – but today we know that the right decisions were made.
A lot has happened in the game since then. However, Fortnite still manages to surprise its players, to reinvent itself and to deliver a crazy adventure: Fortnite is really no longer a shooter – the latest update finally causes chaos to break out