Good lord, what is happening in there?
It does one credit to try and stay on top of the gigantic monolith of cross-brand marketing which is known as Fortnite, because to just ignore it is to live a life of lies. I mean, we joke all we want about the insanity of the metaverse and the stupid proposition that any one brand can hold the combined IPs and properties of everyone in a gloved gauntlet of oppression, but that doesn't quite feel so funny when we're talking about a project that pretty much has done that and is merely in the process of doing victory laps around the parking lot. Fortnite is the home of brands, plain and simple. if you are a brand, Fortnite will come sliding into you DMs at somepoint, luring you in with honeyed words and slight flirtations, before sneaking an arm around you shoulder at the feature, playing a little game with your collar bone to keep you distracted, and then dislocating it's jaw like a snake and latching it's jagged-edged teeth across your entire head, painfully and methodically swallowing you into itself. Less 'Lovecraftian' and more 'Cronenberg'.
Which is probably how we ended up with the current release of Fortnite, the premier of which not only revealed the next act in the Fortnite play, but also contained with it a reveal for the release of the next game from the Rocket League developers, Rocket Racer, existing entirely within Fortnite itself. It is insane to think that Fortnite's dream of becoming a platform is no longer limited just to how players and brands collide across it's many systems, but also now how other developers look up the software. I know that Fortnite has had comprehensive building tools for a while now, enough to potentially rival what Roblox has, but you never hear about a serious developer releasing their next title on Roblox. (It happens, but not from millionaire success-story developers.) Some sort of 'Advent Horizon' has certainly been crossed by the Fortnite folks and it positively runs my blood cold to think of. Imagine if Hollow Knight Silksong is taking so long because they're porting the whole thing into Fortnite! Gods I- I don't know what I'd do. Is man so malleable that his fragile flesh walls can contain the chaos of creating a new Fortnite account past age twenty-five? No- I cannot possibly even consider such a disgrace... can I?
But that is not the only act in Fortnite's current play. You probably don't need to hear this because of how everyone has seen the transition with their own eyes, but the current season of Fortnite has lightly shirked off the Battle Royale's skin altogether in order to become a... survival crafting game in the vein of Minecraft? (Actually, maybe a little closer to Valheim for the more diminutive scale of the crafting.) And it's all rendered in Lego. Because we needed to throw in another brand selling their soul for quick profits. (Whatever happened to the quality Lego videogame brand, man?) Of course, because of the nature of the endless dozens of Fortnite servers, one can probably still log in for a cheeky bit of Battle Royale in some errant server... I think... but the main game is not a cooperative survival title for the next few months. And that is... so bizarre I don't even know what to think to be honest. Is that a great evolution or an insane trick to an audience of the bewildered?
Already players of Fortnite have flocked, nay sped, to demonstrate exactly why they shouldn't be granted any remote powers of creativity. If desperately attempting to cause a ruckus as the Xenomorph during the Black History Month event a while back wasn't enough, trying to utilise Catwoman's 'whip crack' emote for shock effect, then how about this- It took creator's less then a day to recreate the 9/11 attacks. And yes, I said creator's, because the population of Fortnite apparently operate on the same malnourished and overworked braincell which bounced the exact same idea across every creator's head over the course of less than one day. (That is one overachieving Neuron! Nina would be proud. Or horrified, probably more horrified.) Which is great. Not really sure what Fortnite's team can do to combat this one, can't just disable an Emote here. Guess they can just bury their heads in their desks and wait for people to get bored on this one.
On the much more legal end, Epic Games managed to win themselves a lawsuit that might just tip fortunes further in their favour. Much a shock to myself, who long believed this to be an utterly frivolous case that would lead nowhere- the monopoly ruling. Basically the Play Store (And the Apple store, although I don't see them on this ruling) forced an app that ran on their infrastructure to use their platform stores in order to sale microtransaction which, given that both types of phones are ruled by either of those stores, would constitute a monopoly. Epic created their own entire storefront to get away from Steam's store royalties, squaring up against the mobile platforms was only a matter of time. And, by the gods, it seems that they actually won!
It's not quite certain what will come of this as of yet, but if Fortnite is given the go ahead to run their own first party store, and then return to the mobiles, it would be a much welcome income injection to Epic who are currently flushing untold millions down the drain in an attempt to make the Epic Store front a legitimate competitor to Steam, which reports say is pretty slow going. Of course, I want Epic to succeed because the more competition there are in these fields the greater everyone else has to step up their game, but I have seen what Epic does when given a storefront to run, and I still don't think the PC Epic store is even nearly as good as it could be. (At the very least we need better sorting options for our libraries. Steam needs them too, but Epic's need is dire.) And then there are the potential floodgates of now every two-bit scam mobile game might be allowed to open up their own sketchy links to questionable funding platforms. There's a lot to iron out.
This all sends quite the message, doesn't it? When it comes to the supremacy of Fortnite there's not one powerful enough to stand in their way, not even the giant that is Alphabet itself. I never thought anyone could win a monopoly lawsuit against the world's most powerful monopoly- considering how they rule online traffic, I assumed that those who earned the ire of Google merely got vanished from the Earth. But then, Fortnite do control the brands, don't they? Can any one person truly say that they've 'made it' in life unless they have themselves as a skin in Fortnite? Of course not. In today's digital world that is the singular mark of overall worth that we all seek with clammy and desperate hunger! I'm sure in a year's time we'll get the 'Google' Skin pack and the 'Apple' skin pack as the former legal enemies of Tim Sweeny become absorbed into the all-consuming body of his ever-feeding marketing baby, amorphous and abstract as it has become.
So Fortnite is still on it's A-game, it would seem. They recently broke their concurrent player count once again- which is insane to think about given how many years it's been since that game was the peak of the culture, and they remain influential in a world that refuses to move on without them. Given how I've not played the game in years it makes me feel just that little bit out-of-touch to not be playing the thing, but then I remind myself that I am an adult and being in the Fortnite player pool would be weird. I wonder how Minecraft still stacks up to Fortnite in terms of culture saturation? Would it be greater, given Minecraft's obvious influence on Fortnite's design, or has Fortnite eclipsed it? Or is the metric of brand collaboration a smoke screen of significance given false power by the veneer of the 'celebrity' age? Questions for philosophers, no doubt- that shall be argued in the historical annals several generations from now.
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