How the release of Fortnite shook the entire gaming industry
The gaming industry is a very interesting industry. Typically, you can model the industry as a graph with many large groups of people. Each group endorses a certain video game as their main game, and rarely switch to other games. However, once in a while, a new video game releases and causes a huge cascade in the network in which everyone endorses the new game. Fortnite was one of these games, causing a cascade in the video game network that is unmatched by any other new releases. We can analyze how Fortnite caused such a cascade with the concepts we have been learning in class.
Firstly, Fortnite was free-to-play and allowed cross-platform gaming. Many of Fortnite’s competitors when it released were not free to play. Fortnite was also one of the first games to enable cross-platform gaming, which allowed people on PS4 and Xbox to play with PC gamers. These two things were great incentives for people to give the game a try. As a result, the initial number of people switching to Fortnite was extremely high, which is very favorable for an information cascade.
Secondly, the payoff of choosing to play Fortnite over other games was extremely high. Very early on, the creators of Fortnite, Epic Games, announced that they were going to host a tournament with a prize pool of one hundred million dollars, the biggest prize pool in any game up to that point. In addition, for content creators (people who make a living off of streaming video games), there was a huge incentive to switch over because the viewership for Fortnite blew all other games out of the water. With such a high payoff, the value of q (the fraction of friends that played Fortnite needed for one to switch) was extremely low. With such a high initial number of players and great incentives to switch, the cascade of gamers switching to Fortnite was astronomically fast and strong. Many other video game companies suffered because so many people left their games to play Fortnite. Fortnite has become a behemoth in the gaming industry and it looks like they aren’t going away any time soon. It will take another huge cascade caused by another well developed, newly released video game for the gaming industry to see change.