8 Video Games That Caught Lightning In A Bottle
6. Fortnite Battle Royale
The battle royale genre was popularised by the success of PUBG: Battlegrounds in 2017, and it was only inevitable that a glut of me-too imitators were going to follow suit.
And first up was Epic's Fortnite Battle Royale, which manage to launch just six months behind PUBG, while offering up a more accessible and polished battle royale experience whose cartoonish aesthetic made it infinitely more appealing to young children. Oh, and it was free to play.
Within a matter of months, Fortnite Battle Royale eclipsed PUBG's player count and never looked back, while around this time PUBG Corporation filed a lawsuit against Epic, believing that Fortnite infringed upon the copyright of PUBG.
The lawsuit was ultimately closed a few months later for unknown reasons, and by 2020 Fortnite as an overall brand had generated more than $9 billion in revenue, categorically dwarfing PUBG, which had certainly been a stonking commercial success itself.
All the same, Fortnite quickly wrestled the lion's share of the battle royale market away from PUBG in record time - a result of Epic's ability to quickly produce their own quality riff on the same idea before anyone else could.