Streaming mogul Netflix claims Fortnite is now a bigger competitor than other media companies like Game of Thrones and True Detective producer HBO.
[...] It's a notable comparison that highlights not only how incredulously popular Epic's last-man-standing shooter has become, but also how its impact is now being felt by some of the biggest names outside of the games industry.
Indeed, it's easy to see why Netflix considers Fortnite a main rival. The free-to-play title is available on almost every platform imaginable, from consoles and PCs to smartphones, and hit 8.3 million concurrent players before Christmas.
Is Netflix right? Is gaming a bigger long-term threat to streaming services than the streaming services are to each other?
Related Stories
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long been an outspoken opponent of what he sees as Valve's unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before the launch of the competing Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees.
The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are "no longer justifiable."
[...]
The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017, starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread, he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc."
[...]
The second email chain revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple's total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court.
[...]
In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam.
[...]
After being forwarded the message by Valve's Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic "You mad bro?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @01:02AM (1 child)
Netflix, you are your own worst enemy.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Monday January 21 2019, @03:39PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @01:05AM (1 child)
Now we can stop talking about religion, and, . . . NO! Fortnight? Bigger than HBO? Bigger than Netflix? Bigger than God? Repent, Soylentils! Truly this is the End of Times. Or at least of CableTV.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Monday January 21 2019, @02:44AM
Hopefully the end of Cable TV. (or a least made to become a shadow of it current self.)
Actually there are many cord cutters now... they are a minority but increasing every year. Many are going to Netflix... or Hulu.. or Sling... or one of the multiple other current and future competitors.
Personally, I have only gone to Antenna TV only at my house. Just some local news... all my other regular entertainment is on a computer. Mostly games. Now if I get bored of games, I still have a very large collection of DVDs that I have amassed over the last 20 years (and have ripped to be used on a Kodi box that I installed on a linux computer.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @01:25AM (6 children)
Can someone explain fortnite's popularity to me? It doesn't seem like this game is any different than dozens of first person shooters that came before it. Why this one?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @01:31AM (1 child)
"Can someone explain fortnite's popularity ?"
-
The masses are a bunch of IDIOTS.
Fortnite is "popular" with them, in the same way that the "food" served at McDonald's is "popular" with idiots.
Popularity doesn't mean it's good : popularity just means a lot of idiots like it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Monday January 21 2019, @07:36AM
Your friends say, "oh, let's eat at McDonald's -- or Wendy's or Burger King." Otherwise known as B.K. And I said to my tax guy, let's do B.K.'s, he did a double take. Anyway, your friends want to eat Fast Food with you, what do you do? What can you do -- you eat it, right? In massive amounts. And Fortnite is like Fast Food. It's not the fanciest. But it's very clean. And everybody enjoys it. wsj.com/video/three-boys-explain-why-they-play-fortnite-every-chance-they-get/14C90D13-03B1-440D-A024-B41C437F0C72.html [wsj.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Apparition on Monday January 21 2019, @01:42AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday January 21 2019, @01:49PM
Also extensive character customization including “dance moves” ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by exaeta on Monday January 21 2019, @01:44AM
I don't play fortnight myself. But I know it's popular for the same reasons that Overwatch and TF2 are popular. The game is actually half decent.
The majority of modern shooter games are, frankly, garbage. TF2 pioneered the "shooter that doesn't suck" genre, and 8-9 years later people wondering why that game was still popular decided to emulate it a bit. So we got Overwatch, and then Fortnite decided to hop on the bandwagon.
Fortnite isn't a copy of TF2, but it has a lot of similarities to TF2/Rust. It basically took good parts from both.
Personally I don't play it but given the lack of decent shooter games that pose a challenge beyond "shoot faster and more accurately" Fortnite cements its place among the shooter games that don't suck.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @04:19PM
It's because they can get people to write articles like these.
(Score: 1) by progo on Monday January 21 2019, @01:44AM (4 children)
I'm not a gamer, but it seems to me most games can't hold attention long enough to be a threat to a TV subscription. I see games like World of Warcraft which has no doubt made a hefty return on the original development investment, but how common are these games?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most profitable games either blockbuster titles that last a little over a year, or otherwise low-investment, low-price-to-pay casual things?
All Netflix has to do is just keep surviving.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday January 21 2019, @02:02AM (2 children)
I found this take:
which I think is a much better piece than the Gamasutra piece. [variety.com]
It starts: It may be mostly gamesmanship to downplay looming threats, but Netflix says it’s not really focused on rival streaming-video services from Amazon, Hulu, Disney, WarnerMedia or other big players as much as improving its own service to win share of consumers’ attention.
My take from that is that Netflix thinks Disney, Timewarner etc don't really understand what it takes to succeed in the streaming media business, and they may well be right.
As far as I can see, the traditional media company (music and video) have spent the last 20 years desperately trying to fend off the Internet as a delivery mechanism for their products.
Maybe they've seen the light now, but Netflix thinks they will do it badly. I think I agree with Netflix.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday January 21 2019, @02:46AM (1 child)
Disney thinks people are prepared to pay $10 to stream CBS without ads?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday January 21 2019, @06:59PM
I imagine the executives at Disney who make those sorts of decisions have no clue what their potential customers want.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday January 21 2019, @03:01AM
I have not played Fortnight. (FPS is not my favorite type of game, linux is not supported, and I try to avoid "Freemium/Pay2Win" games.)
I have played Factorio [factorio.com]. I have also played Rimworld [rimworldgame.com]. These are mind engaging games and I have over 1200 hours in each according to Steam. Yes, I know that is a crapload of time and Netflix is right, no way would I have that much time in a video game if I did not give up watching TV regularly.
Those are both indie games (i.e. half the price of AAA Studio crap) and are not micro-transaction or subscription based. All it takes is a few good games to make you not care about TV and pay a fraction of the cost.
Netflix should be worried... I do not see Fortnight as a problem... its a fad right now and will probably die out. I doubt it will go away completely until Epic stops supporting it, but there is always a multitude of other games that are appealing, and as a whole video games is a huge threat to TV.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday January 21 2019, @02:26AM
I have x number of hours to have fun. Especially now that it's dark early I'm playing Dishonored 2 instead of watching TV. During the summer I'll be playing something different.
I often have the "I'm tired of playing games, I should watch some TV show instead". Note how my goto is video games, not TV.
/ I've played fortnight, whatever
// Got Black Ops 4 with battle royale, haven't played it in a month. Not interested.
/// I really wanted the Spiderman black friday instead of BOPS4, alas, it was not to be :(
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by goodie on Monday January 21 2019, @05:07AM (1 child)
To me, this has a specific meaning.
If you watch Netflix, chances are by now you have multiple service subscriptions (Prime, etc.). So, essentially, you're not looking to pick the best medium to watch your show. Nope. You're basically paying for multiple cable packages (cheaper for now, but we will get there eventually...) and you use the package based on what you want to watch. The point is, whether you watch Netflix or HBO, you are already in the path of watching something on tv.
Now, the game, it's something else. It's a different activity, not a different medium. So for Netflix, it's not about content, it's about the nature of the activity itself. Because if you play any game, you won't watch Netflix, or HBO or whatever else. Only when you want to watch a show do those competitors such as HBO etc. come into play. It's like the second stage of the process. The first one being "what do I want to do right now?"
You're not competing for streaming supremacy. You're competing for people's time, it's more fundamental. That's why they loved it when youngsters starting to talk about "netflix and chill".
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @08:54AM
Yes, time is very limited. Though not all games are the same, for example when playing single player strategy games, I can comfortably watch reruns of my favorite shows on another monitor.