FORTNITE!
That’s right edgy YouTube commenter, it’s time to hop on this cringey hype train!
Did you ever believe it was possible?
For video games to go this mainstream?
OH GOD MAKE IT STOP!
News channels that never cared about video games (besides the occasional report about
how they’re destroying your children and turning them into murderers) are covering
this phenomenon.
Since its inception gaming has garnered an isolated community.
Occasionally something from this community would catch the attention of normies with
hilarious, confusing, and rather offensive results.
I’ve already touched on the propaganda-esque news reports
but let’s not forget about the positives like the World of Warcraft South Park episode
or this weird Tom Hanks movie
That clip was about Dungeons and Dragons but you get the idea.
Indeed video games have been fighting for legitimacy for quite some time...always on
the edges of society but never quite a main focus.
For centuries our main sources of entertainment have been sports, theatre, music, and more
recently, movies and TV shows.
However, as society continues to push the limits of technology, video games continue
to gain momentum.
Fortnite busting onto the scene with 125 million users is no coincidence.
It’s still getting a run for its money from Minecraft, sure...but will that last forever?
MOVE OVER CHRISTIAN MINECRAFT SERVERS!
Godless emotes with devilish dancing are poised to take over.
As Ninja sits atop his golden throne, as more and more cringey 10 year olds continue to
leap proudly from the battle bus, Fortnite grows stronger.
Have you ever asked yourself...why is this happening?
How did Fortnite out-meme the oh-so-similar PUBG and the million other copycats?
And most importantly...what does this phenomenon mean for video games as we know them?
Surely something as big as this will profoundly affect the future.
So throw money at some dope emotes so your friends think you’re cool, slap a news anchor
at your earliest convenience and PREPARE YOURSELF for the future, for culture as we know it
shattered into oblivion.
THIS IS THE STORY OF THE STORM SWEEPING ACROSS OUR GLOBAL SOCIETY, THE STORY OF FORTNITE...THE
STORY...you never knew.
First things first...let’s cover real quick WHY Fortnite has become the sensation we see
before us.
At a glance, we can skip some obvious answers that most have thought about.
For instance...this game is Free to Play.
When things are free...people are more willing to try it.
That’s what we keep telling our sponsors anyway!
Sure you can spend as much as you want within the game, but a person can go FOREVER without
spending a dime and still be just as competitive as someone who dropped a thousand dollars.
This right here is the biggest, most obvious reason Fortnite exploded.
It costs nothing and microtransactions don’t affect the gameplay.
WHATACONCEPT.
Hi EA.
Now let’s get into the less obvious stuff.
For instance, you may recall Fortnite only exploded AFTER it introduced Battle Royale
mode which, of course, totes ripped off PUBG.
So if they’re so similar, why did one usurp the other in terms of concurrent players?
First of all the graphics style of Fortnite is WAY more appealing to the general population.
PUBG looks cool and all but it’s got a gritty, Call of Duty vibe which for anyone not interested
in that military vibe...well it’s kind of a turn off.
Fortnite, however, took a formula gamers already loved...tweaked it a bit with smaller maps,
slightly different weapons, a building mechanic, and slapped a cartoony artstyle on top of
it.
It’s so cute!
Great, so the game has its own spin and looks more appealing to your average person whereas
PUBG appeals more to Call of Duty dude-bros - that’s an exaggeration please don’t
write mean comments I’m fragile.
While this is interesting it’s hardly the story you never knew.
Now let’s get into the meat of it.
The biggest source of mainstream appeal (and cringe) comes from... emotes.
That’s right.
The deciding factor between impressive craze and earth-shattering phenomenon IS...emotes.
Surely you’ve known they’re important to Fortnite’s popularity...but do you know
what they’ve actually done?
It’s a little more complicated than just “people like dancing”.
Do a quick YouTube search and you’ll find no shortage of children and grown-ass adults
dancing like they just pressed C and moused over yonder.
None of this is too surprising.
However.
Fortnite does something no video game has ever done before.
Video games have affected culture for as long as they’ve been a thing...at least in their
own bubble.
Since forever, people have cosplayed their favorite video game characters, repeated their
favorite voice lines, and...well you get the picture.
When games show us something cool, we imitate.
That’s how it’s always been.
Fortnite is the first to switch that process around!
That is to say...when culture shows Fortnite something cool IT imitates culture!
BAM!
Look at these emotes!
The running man, the regal wave, the electro shuffle, that one dance Turk did in Scrubs!
All of these and more have been forever enshrined in Fortnite’s emote history.
Whereas sweet dance moves were once mostly foreign to the world of gaming they are now
completely intertwined with it.
Is it a coincidence it’s one of the first games to take smooth, flowing dance moves
and put them in a medium once dominated by stiff, awkward nerds has become the biggest
thing since sliced bread?
Nope!
This is uncharted territory people! Fortnite is a two way street!
It feeds into culture and culture feeds into it.
That new stupid thing everyone is doing?
Well now it’s a Fortnite emote!
Snapchat memes and gaming memes have crossed paths...and the result has been spectacular.
Celebrities once luke-warm about video games or even ones that always loved them now gave
enough shits to actually play them in public.
You’ve likely heard of that time Drake played with Ninja on stream and the internet exploded
for 24 hours.
Maybe Drake was looking for dance inspiration from emotes and stumbled across Ninja.
Anything is possible.
Anyway during said stream there was also rapper Travis Scott, tech entrepreneur Kim DotCom,
and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Talk about a blending of worlds!
This was completely unprecedented...even more so than that time Casey Neistat pretended
to know things about Battlefield 5.
So what are the implications of this?
Why should you care that Fortnite appeals to all walks of life?
Well as was stated earlier, video games are the newest form of modern entertainment and
therefore have a MASSIVE amount of untapped potential.
That Ninja stream broke non-tournament records with over 635,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch!
Clearly that’s a lot...but let me put that in perspective for you.
Ninja’s current monthly average is around 30 million views on Twitch plus anywhere from
145 million to 180 million views on YouTube per month.
After some simple arithmetic that comes out to over 2 billion views every year!
(2 billion three hundred ten million to be exact).
Do you see what’s going on here?
Probably not because I haven’t connected these numbers to anything.
BAM!
Case in point!
Perhaps you’ve heard of a little sport called Football.
NO, NOT SOCCER!
The REAL Football.
A game popular in the United States of America-land that’s played on a professional level in
the National Football League.
The NFL!
In the US, this is the most popular sport by far and yet... viewership is going down
further and further every year.
Concussions, a kneeling controversy you may have heard about, and a general malaise for
the corporate bullshit league that runs it all have pushed ratings and viewership lower
and lower with each recent year.
In 2017 a typical game was watched by 14.9 million people.
Still pretty solid if we’re being honest.
HOWEVER that’s down 9.7% from the previous year.
With a total of 256 regular season games between 32 teams each playing 16 games each, you can
do some math and realize that the regular NFL season pulls in about 3.81 billions viewers
every year.
Add on the playoffs and then the super bowl at the end of the season and you’re in the
ballpark of 4 billion yearly views.
Tack on the NFL YouTube channel and you’re even in the range of five billion yearly views.
“But Grant…”
You might be asking…”if the NFL has over twice the viewership of Ninja then who cares
about any of this?”
Well gentle viewer...remember that Ninja is just one dude.
Literally one guy with dyed hair and an adderall prescription - I mean Red Bull sponsorship
- is getting half the views of a massive corporation with thousands of employees.
That is INSANE.
And that’s not even the TOTAL viewers for Fortnite.
Just in February alone it pulled in over 2.4 billion views on YouTube.
Sound ridiculous?
Throw in all the kill compilations, funny moments videos, and hundreds of other streamers
and YouTubers who aren’t Ninja and you’ve got a video game that’s EASILY surpassing
a real-life sport which once reigned king of entertainment in America.
And don’t worry non-Americans who think I’m stuck up my countries own ass.
Fortnite also rivals World Cup viewership and shakes a mean fist at world-wide Soccer,
I mean non-American Football (sorry everyone who isn’t America), viewership throughout
the year.
It would seem e-sports...are overtaking sport-sports.
And Fortnite is the first game to really do it.
Not to mention a lot of people who watch Football or Soccer don’t necessarily even PLAY Football
or Soccer.
At least not past High School or College.
No, your flag football league with the hypercompetitive dude in sports-glasses doesn’t count.
No!
Fortnite is very much an interactive phenomenon.
How many lucky (or unlucky) players have happened to come across Ninja during a match and then
be able to tell all their friends they just played a round with Ninja and lost immediately?
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s a lot more than the number of people who can
say they’ve air-raided the pitch with Christiano Ronaldo or caught a Phillip Rivers interception.
Indeed Fortnite is very much an interactive phenomenon as opposed to a spectator sport.
Because basically anyone can play video games!
You don’t even have to leave your house.
It’s no coincidence that nerds are cool now.
Those jocks spankin’ each other in the locker room don’t know what they’re missing.
Unless they do and that’s why JuJu Smith-Schuster partakes in Battle Royale.
The breaching of video games into mainstream entertainment is a very new and beautiful
thing.
With the visual appeal, the tried and true Battle Royale genre, and the emotes that so
easily absorb mainstream culture, Fortnite grew to gargantuan popularity while rivaling
or flat-out surpassing the world’s most popular sporty sports.
Parents are even hiring coaches so their kids don’t suck.
AND CHILDREN ARE LOSING PRODUCTIVITY AND BEING BRAINWASHED INTO BECOMING MURDERERS.
And news stations are making terrible news reports about it.
“The thing that makes Fortnite so different is...people can play duo, as a team and people
can really interact over the video game.”
“It’s free addictive, violent, and kids love it”, “so why are kids as young as
nine playing the violent game”?, “Tonight a warning from the experts, there are many
risks involved with playing violent video games”, “The violent video game fortnite”,
“she’s concerned about the impact the violent video game may have on her son”,
“They can actually show high rates of aggression themselves”
So next time you see the news covering this game or others in their neutral yet eerily
biased tone just know it’s all part of the process.
The process of video games finally being legitimized and spreading all over the world in unprecedented
numbers . And this is just the beginning.
As developing countries come online, billions more will feed into this Battle Royale phenomenon
and the future games it’s currently paving the way for.
Cringe will be forced into our eye-balls in even greater numbers!
And for that...we can thank...well you get the idea.
That’s the story of a single game playing ambassador to mainstream culture.
Of a craze that solidified gaming as worth the time of the rich and famous.
That’s the story of Fortnite...the story...you never knew.
And...that’s my take on Fortnite!
Let me know down below what you think!
This game really has changed the world as we know it and I for one am excited to see
what comes next.
Anywho, see that subscribe button?
The one right there?
I’d recommend clicking or tapping it and then smacking that bell so you get notified
as soon as we post a video.
Go on.
CLICK OR TAP IT.
It’s the thing to do.
And now that we’ve got that outta the way go ahead and check out Waluigi the story you
never knew.
He’s the meme who will never die so why not learn his deep dark secrets?
He’ll be right here for you.
I’m Grant, that’s all I’ve got for today.
Bye everyone!