Fortnite is one of the most popular battle royale games ever, and is on the verge of going down in history as one of the best ever if the run continues.
In fact, the game has managed to surpass PUBG on a number of key parameters, and earned $126 million in revenues last month, while its fellow Battle Royale rival could manage only $103 million. However, latest reports now seem to suggest that even Epic Games might not have anticipated the immense popularity of the title.
That’s because, according to Ed Zobrist, the Head of Publishing for Fortnite, the company didn’t take any more than two months to develop the game. He also said that the game was only meant to be a PvP mode within a PvE game called ‘Save the World’. According to Zobrist, it was only in the final couple of weeks before release that the company decided to disassociate the two and make it free-to-play. Save the World, meanwhile, comes with a $40 price-tag.
Talking to reporters on the final day of the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone center in San Francisco, he revealed that the company started working on the battle royale mode (Fortnite) around the same time Save the World was released, which was on July 21, 2017. As it turned out, Fortnite was released on September 26, 2017.
“We started working on this just about the time Save the World was coming out. Two months in development, launched in September 26. So let’s do some math: Save the World, the PvE game, launched July 21. [Battle Royale] comes out September 26”
This is certainly a stunning piece of news, given that most popular games spend years in development and cost studios millions of dollars. However, the company had to resort to taking some help from third-party experts to meet the time-frame. According to Zobrist, it was the Unreal Tournament team that did much of the heavy lifting.
He also seemed proud of the company’s stunning achievement in pushing out the game in such record time, wondering if “any major publisher could have pulled off this kind of pivot in the time we ended up doing it”.
