Nurturing the Competitive Scene
Fortnite’s battle royale gameplay isn’t necessarily the easiest to transfer into an esport from a logistics standpoint. How do you follow what all players are doing at once? How is it all ranked when you could win the game with just one kill? Are there specific rules that are imposed? That’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a ton of work that needs to be done from taking a title from a game people enjoy playing at home into turning it into a competitive esport with a large audience. That’s not stopping Epic Games from giving its best, though.
In the past couple of weeks alone, Epic Games has clearly made strides to really kickstart Fortnite’s competitive scene. Not only did it introduce the Solo Showdown game mode this weekend just gone, answering (at least) one of the above questions, providing players with an opportunity to see how they fare in a competitive environment, and offering some sweet cosmetics as a reward for playing all 50 games required to rank, it also put its money where its mouth was. Epic announced it will provide $100 million to fund prize pools around the world for the Fortnite competitive scene. That’s a pretty huge prize pool for a game that’s not even a year old. Guess we know where all those V-Bucks we’ve been spending have gone.