8 Video Games Built To Kill The Competition (That WON)
4. Fortnite Battle Royale
The battle royale game came to prominence in 2017 with the release of the phenomenally popular PUBG: Battlegrounds, but later that year, Epic responded with Fortnite Battle Royale - a free-to-play entry into the genre which categorically stole its thunder.
Though it might be alarmist to say that Fortnite outright killed PUBG given that PUBG still regularly has upwards of 500,000 concurrent players, it did put a massive, irreversible dent in its popularity, given that at its peak in 2018, it often had as many as 3 million concurrent players.
Fortnite being free and having the resources to more swiftly update the game and respond to player feedback allowed it to surge in popularity, enough that PUBG Corp. sued Epic in 2018, accusing Fortnite of infringing upon their copyright. Ultimately they dropped the suit.
PUBG's player base quickly declined while Fortnite's continued to rise, and even today it still regularly has concurrent player counts in the millions. Fortnite became the most popular game in the world, while many forgot about PUBG entirely.
Given the huge mountain Epic had to climb to topple such a phenomenally successful and innovative game, it's pretty shocking how quickly they pulled it off.