Epic’s Fortnite has been in development a long time, and then late last year they gave people the chance to enter the beta for the game if they paid $40. This seemed like a bad deal to me. $40 to play a free-to-play game early? I wasn’t the only person who thought so either. It wasn’t doing very well, plus the fun base building game was walled behind a bunch of F2P mechanics (that your currently have to pay $40 for), so Epic smartly pivoted to something they knew they could do well, copy PUBG and give it away for free. It worked. 40 Million downloads and 2 Million concurrent players later Fortnite is a hit, but it still is not king of the Battle Royal hill.
PUBG has less downloads, not surprising since Fortnite costs you nothing and PUBG costs $30, but PUBG frequently has over 3 Million concurrent players on Steam alone, and who knows how many Xbox players the game has at a given time, but it is a lot. In other words, PUBG rules this game space for now, but I think Fortnite can change that, if they are smart.
First they need to ditch all the F2P garbage they have been developing, and then just let Fortnite have three game modes: Battle Royal (PvP), Survive (Base Defense, PvE), and Explore (Minecraft, PvEvP). Then give it away for free like Battle Royal and sell tons of skins and hats, like a lot, a lot. Ding, Ding, Ding! Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner! Epic would then have a complete game with three fun things to do, and an easy monetization scheme. AKA sell tons of digital crap for their three very fun game modes. No city building or cool down nonsense.
If they do that, I bet more of those 40 Million people would play the game instead of just trying out Battle Royal once and figuring out that PUBG is a bit better. They would keep playing because there is more to do, and those things are fun. Meanwhile, PUBG will still only have its one, admittedly great, game mode, so if you get sick of that, you stop playing the game, and there goes selling all those loot box keys.