As Epic Games’ battle royale behemoth Fortnite jumps from controversy to controversy, it’s clear that something isn’t right with the beloved free-to-play game.
Following V-Bucks price increases earlier this year, Epic Games laid off over 1,000 developers working on Fortnite as the cost to support the live-service game continues to skyrocket. With a large chunk of the workforce gone, remaining developers have warned that these layoffs will have a drastic effect on the game’s future for years to come.
Since the game’s shift to battle royale in 2018, Fortnite has been a cultural icon of the games industry, for better and for worse. Last year’s The Simpsons mini-season was a huge boon for the game with unprecedented player counts, but experts warn that the game’s “cultural moment is starting to fade”.
Games industry analyst and researcher Joost van Dreunen explained in a recent post that Fortnite’s recent layoffs are evidence of a “real-time collapse of American cultural dominance in interactive entertainment”
The expert explains that the “more or less stagnant” player count for Fortnite over the past few years, despite the creation and acquisition of multiple game modes, proves that “Fortnite’s cultural moment is starting to fade”, especially as major partnerships “have not led to sustained growth in the user base”.
“As I see it, Epic Games is more than a casualty of bad timing or a bad quarter. It is the most legible example yet of what happens when structural conditions make decline inevitable,” he continued, adding, “forever games, it turns out, aren’t”.
As far as the plan for the future of Fortnite goes, it would appear that Epic is planning to double down on its attempts to compete with Roblox via UEFN. As official game modes shutter, Epic’s plans focus on allowing fans to create entire experiences within the digital platform.
In a recent response to fans, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed that UEFN improvements are coming so fans can remake scrapped game modes “better” than the studio.
“The engine & tools team at Epic is reorganizing around delivering as many useful features and Verse capabilities as possible for building varied and feature-rich games,” the CEO said. “We had a UE5/UEFN split among the teams previously and now everyone is together.”
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Fortnite is in a clear stage of decline, especially following the game’s massive reputational loss this year. As with any decline, there may well be a way out of this for the studio, but it’s evident that the game has a long struggle ahead of it.
