Last Wednesday, Drake joined popular Fortnite player Tyler “Ninja” Blevins on his Twitch stream to play a couple of Fortnite games. By the time the stream was over, Ninja had 50,000 new subscribers, had shattered the Twitch record for concurrent viewers on an individual stream with 635,000, and NFL player Juju Smith-Schuster and hip hop artist Travis Scott had joined the action.
The eyes of the gaming world were on Blevins’ stream — and he didn’t disappoint. The group won multiple games, even with Drake following in a bush. While entertainment personalities have streamed on Twitch before, nobody with the star power of Drake had ever been on the platform.
For former ESPN writer and current esports consultant Rod Breslau, this was a moment in gaming unlike anything he had ever seen before — and he’s seen a lot.
No matter your personal feelings about Fortnite or @Ninja and Drake, tonight is a momentous victory for all of Twitch, streamers, and the entire world of gaming. This happened because people from all walks of life just truly love video games.
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 15, 2018
“It really was incredible for me. I really did see it as a transformative moment for gaming. I am cynical and jaded and good at yelling at people for making things bigger than they are, but this was special,” Breslau said. “For all this to come together organically – because Epic didn’t pay Drake or any of those guys – that is what gaming is all about, having people come together to play games. This was a star moment for the whole industry.”
Drake is an influencer for a generation. The effect he had from being on a stream will open up the floodgates for other people from the sports and entertainment industries to find a home on Twitch. Everybody from Terrell Owens to Logic was tweeting about the stream last Wednesday.
I want to play Fortnite now
— Terrell Owens (@terrellowens) March 15, 2018
Tell the boy drizzy he don’t want it with Bobby!
— Bobby Tarantino (@Logic301) March 15, 2018
“There was no better ambassador to bring people on than Drake,” Breslau said. “I am 100% sure that this will only encourage more people from the entertainment industries to stream. Also, it is great that they want to play competitive multiplayer. They aren’t playing casual games, they’re playing esports-like experiences.”
But is it an esport?
Fortnite is competitive and popular, but it has a long ways to go to be an esport. Here’s why:
-It’s a Battle Royale game, same as Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds (PUBG) and H1Z1, which means it’s one vs. 100. It could be two, or four, if playing duos or squads respectively, but Battle Royale games are not the head-to-head competition most esports are.
-All players start with nothing but a pickaxe and have to find loot once they land on the map. The location of the loot is random, which can lead to early deaths by not finding a gun or only finding distance weapons.
-The randomness doesn’t stop there. Once landed, the playable area continually shrinks in random circles. If a player is already in the circle, great! If not, having to run across open fields to make it to the new area is an easy way to get sniped. That is inherent randomness that most esports *cough* Hearthstone *cough* try to avoid.
-Broadcasting difficulties. Many esports struggle with the best way to capture action; it has been a problem in every first-person shooter (FPS) game with multiple viewpoints. Fortnite and PUBG take the already difficult task of combining ten players’ screens into a cohesive broadcast.
“Fortnite [as an esport] has a long way to go. [Epic Games] has done a great job of getting the game out there but there is a ton more work to do to make this a tier two esport,” Breslau said. “PUBG is way further along competitively and Epic will face the same type of roadblocks and issues that [PUBG developer] Bluehole is overcoming.”
Those issues come from the aforementioned randomness in the game, how to fairly score the competition, and the struggles with broadcasting a massive map with simultaneous action.
Despite its limitations as an esport, PUBG was chosen by SXSW as the “Esports Game of the Year,” which has added to the confusion. But that is testament to the nascent world of esports and gaming, particularly in the eyes of those outside the industry. Only three games really should have a shot at that title: League of Legends, DOTA 2 and CS:GO. They all dwarf PUBG in competitive viewership and include aspects that work well in professional competition.
Admittedly, the pro community in PUBG has been able to alter the game to be quite different from the public version. Among other things, they increased the drop rate for assault rifles and the circles are more restricted to certain areas. Both of those things help with consistency in gameplay.
“As always, the pro scene knows better than the developers how to make the game balanced,” Breslau said. “The public Fortnite game is not ready for pro play. The random loot and random circle drops do not help the pro experience, but also the randomness is so integrated into the game, if you streamline it, the pros will immediately figure out the best strategies and it still won’t be ideal.”
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There is no clear solution for Fortnite. While Battle Royale games are immensely popular, turning them into esports is uncharted territory. PUBG is further along, with the largest tournament prize pool coming from Intel Extreme Masters Oakland with $200,000 in total prizes back in November.
The problem with those tournaments is that because of the Battle Royale format, scoring games isn’t as easy as win-loss. At some tournaments they do a round-robin style where finishes are given points and an eventual winner is determined. That is fair but boring, as the winning team may have been eliminated early in the final round.
“We haven’t had the best rule set. Right now we have tournaments that play several rounds and tally up the points to find a winner and that has proven to be a very fucking anti-climactic, shitty way to finish a tournament,” Breslau said. “It is fair but it has not created an exciting atmosphere or the storyline of how a team became the champions.”
And then there are the broadcasting challenges, which may be the biggest difficulty Battle Royale games like Fortnite will face in attempting to transition to esports.
“The biggest problem is you have 40-80 POVs in a match, trying to broadcast is a nightmare,” Breslau said. “It took 15 years for CS:GO with only ten screens to broadcasted well. The Overwatch League – with all the money they put in it – is still a mess with 12 screens.”
One possible solution is taking a page out of golf’s playbook. Golf has players all over the course and still manages to give all the relevant action. There are obvious differences between Battle Royale games and golf but two key ones are that the pace of play is slower for golf and the grouping of players with similar scores on Sunday helps naturally create climatic moments on the 18th green.
While Fortnite and PUBG are both Battle Royales, they have some big differences which may give Fortnite the advantage in becoming an esport. To start, Epic Games owns the Unreal Engine from which both games are built. That has allowed Epic to deliver a cleaner console experience and quickly bring Fortnite to mobile.
In addition, by allowing players to build structures, Fortnite has created intense engagements that revolve around navigating for the high ground and outsmarting opponents. Finally, while four-player squads have become the standard in PUBG, Fortnite has the chance to introduce solo or duo games that could be better for esports.
Both Epic and Bluehole no doubt hope that Fortnite and PUBG catch on in competitive play; a strong competitive scene, more than any other metric, has resulted in staying power for games. They’ll first have to work out some of the many quirks inherent to Battle Royale games.