Fortnite Battle Royale has become a gaming phenomenon garnering hundreds of millions of users globally since its release in 2017. Yet many players, pros, and content creators have quit the game in the past few years. So just why has Fortnite lost some of its popularity?
“I think that one of the biggest reasons for Fortnite's decline in popularity is the fact that it isn't very approachable by new or more casual players,” said Evan Burns, an Xbox gamer who hasn’t played much Fortnite in the past few years.
“Now with where the game is… the average player is so much better than they were a few years ago,” claimed Tyler Podolski, an active Fortnite player on PC. Podolski builds on Burns’ notion that there is a big skill gap in Fortnite, which discourages new or casual players since everyone else is so much better than them.
So where did this skill gap come from? “Since the Fortnite World Cup was announced in around Season 8 of the game, many people started to do aim training and creative building to better their mechanics,” remarked Marcus Paulin Jr., A Playstation gamer who still actively plays Fortnite. Paulin refers to the first Fortnite World Cup as being the cause of many players' improvement. It was the same event that gave its winner, 16 year old Kyle Giersdorf A.K.A. “Bugha,” $3 million dollars. This was the most money ever won in an Esports tournament at the time and was definitely enough encouragement for players to hone their skills and try to become a pro in time for the next tournament.
“During the time that many people would call Fortnite's peak, Epic Games was updating the game weekly which kept the game fresh,” Evan Burns said when addressing Epic Games’ update system. “The lack of new content for months during the first season of Chapter 2 caused the popularity of the game to suffer heavily,” he continued, referring to when Epic Games revamped Fortnite in Chapter 2 after the “Black Hole Event” which put players in a whole new map. However it was this same update that saw Fortnite be stripped of all the random fun items it once had for a simpler loot pool of basic guns and limited mobility.
“There’d be something fun and the company would take it out,” Billy Woodall shared, then gave an example, “One thing me and my friends had fun with was shopping carts, and they took those out.” Here he adds on to Burns’ idea that Epic games had bad releases in which they took away fun items. Finally he says, “They’re making it more competitive,” Tying in Paulin's previous response.
Although having its downsides, Fortnite is by no means a dying game. The recent release of chapter 2, season 6 saw many famous streamers such as TimTheTatMan and NickMercs return. Travis Scott’s Astronomical virtual concert in April, 2020 had over 12 million players log on to watch, making it one of the most attended concerts in history. Although Fortnite has fallen off being as popular and highly regarded as it once was, it still has many content creators, pros, and regular players dropping out of the battle bus every day, and this will likely not stop anytime soon.