Fortnite Game Strategies You Can Use For Your Game Development Project
- Asha Rajput
December 14, 2023
“Fortnite” – what kind of thoughts came to your mind when you read this game name? Of course, alluring graphics, fascinating characters, an attention-worthy game environment, unique fort-building strategies, and whatnot! It’s not just a game but another escape world for many gamers.
This free-to-play battle royale EPIC game did not get this fame overnight but had to go through many brainstorming sessions, intensive efforts, sliding across strategies, and more. Fortnite came out as something innovative, more like walking out of Jumanji.
It was launched in 2017, and as a result of great work, brought in $9.1 billion of business in its first two years only, with a base of 200M+ players with 8.3M + concurrent players. Then, it achieved an increment of 23% in its monthly revenue after each event.
Over six years, it has created a special space in players’ hearts and minds. Hence, we’ve covered this blog to put in our analysis of Fortnite, like factors that have allured players to choose it over others, which you can take away for your game development project to excel. But before that, let’s first go through the gameplay of it.
What’s the Gameplay of Fortnite?
Fortnite is an action-based attacking and survival game in which players land on their chosen place on the battleground through parachute and go by sprinting, climbing, and smashing their way to be the last person standing.
It also has three game modes with similar graphics, art assets, and game mechanics but with different missions:
Fortnite: Save the World, with a squad (up to 4 players), starts with a scenario in which around 98% of the world population has been wiped out and the logged-in players are the only survivors, who have to survive and save the world from the zombie-like HUSKs by building defensive fortifications around objects to hide or tunnels to lure and trap husks and attacking them to accomplish the mission. Moreover, it’s a pay-to-play game because of its extraordinary gameplay.
Fortnite Battle Royale is a player-versus-player death game of a total of 100 players, where players can play as solo, duo, or squad (up to 4). Here, when players land on the battleground, they are weaponless and must search for weapons, powers, suits, vehicles, and more resources across map areas to survive other players’ attacks as the map shrinks till they are the only ones alive to be the winner – #1 Victory Royale.
Fortnite Creative is a sandbox game that enables players to bring any team from Battle Royale game mode to their personal island and create their gameplay as they want by creating game arenas, challenges, and more.
Understanding Fortnite’s Success Factor
Now, as you’ve already gone through the Fortnite gameplay, it’s time to go through its key strategies that you can adopt for your game to become a hit. But before that, there are three factors behind the growth of any product, especially in the game industry:
- Attract new customers (players in the topic of the game) and engage them to become active users.
- Strategies for retaining the interest of gamers.
- Having a foolproof game monetization strategy to earn revenue, such as by selling premium access to the gamers.
When Fortnite was first launched, they created much hype around the game world to study the kind of game modern audiences would need by revealing the concept in the event Spike Video Game Awards (VGA).
Know the Gaming Trend
When they were creating Fortnite, they knew what kind of game they were going to build, of course, it’s going to be on the theme of players’ battleground. Because they have seen the massive anticipation of battleground games amongst the age group of 10-30 years old when they began the development of the game.
| 📝 Learning from this Fortnite strategy is, “every game genre brings different trends with opportunities for the creators to adopt and shine in the market, so it’s very important to be updated with game development trends.” |
Setting Up Unique Factors for the Game
Check out any popular game – be it Fortnite, PUBG, Free Fire, Valorant, etc., they all have their unique mechanisms that have grabbed the attention of players to continue playing them. As we learn from Fortnite’s strategies, they have brainstormed a lot to derive its unique factors for the game.
And Fortnite’s building mechanism is its unique factor. They understood the players’ need to survive for the longest possible time in the game while making the game interesting.
Understanding player psychology, Fortnite has implemented three building mechanics in the game:
- Boxing/Tarping/Tunneling: More like creating tunnels, which is often considered the best defense fortification in the end-game.
- High-ground Retakes: These are the advanced building maneuvers through double ramp rush, 90-degree turns, pyramid retakes, cone jumps, high-ground peeking, tunneling retakes, and more for the players to have a high-ground advantage over opponents.
- Piece Control: It enhances the player’s ability to manipulate and control individual building structures (pieces) during a battle. This includes editing structures, building structures strategically, isolating opponents, box fighting, retakes, high ground, and much more.
| 📝 Learning from it, no matter what genre of game you’re creating, not just in the players’ defense mechanism, but in other game parts should also have your unique factors that any player would find fascinating. |
Level Design
What makes your game much more interesting to players? It’s the “WOW” and “OMG” moments that challenge players to finish the game level. And, of course, every game developer designing their game would be looking for this hook to gain the player’s maximum attention and engagement. Not to mention, Fortnite excelled in this as well.
Fortnite’s level design is characterized by dynamic and evolving environments. The game’s map changes over time, introducing new points of interest, challenges, interactive elements, hidden secrets, and thematic updates. It keeps the gameplay experience fresh and engages players in exploring the evolving landscape.
Unlike other games, Fortnite didn’t have different levels, but of course, the evolving challenges created by game players for each other and also forced one to make players get into a clash to achieve victory. That level of challenges included setting up supplies, map shrinks, and much more.
| 📝 Learning from Fortnite’s level design strategy is to find out obvious challenges that would make players intrigued to come back and play it again and again until they achieve victory. |
Also, check out our expert insights on game level designing to make your game enticing.
Engaging Storytelling
It’s important for the game to have alluring visuals, animation, and power-packed performance, but those all can go to waste if the storytelling of the game is not intriguing enough.
As we are here demystifying the strategies of Fortnite, let’s talk about how the EPIC game planned the storytelling of this revolutionary:
In the 2018 Game Awards, Donald Mustard shared the team’s approach to the storytelling of Fortnite.
According to him, the idea of storytelling in Fortnite is not something out of the box. They just followed the imagination to find ways to create truly mass-scale, broad-based entertainment – and that’s through narrative conceit.
The guiding principle of Fortnite storytelling was on the why of what’s happening, finding hooks critical for gamers to be emotionally attached to unlock the entertainment bomb, rather than creating a typical character-driven, three-act structure.
As the concept of Fortnite is a multiplayer battleground, its storytelling cannot be as straightforward, but there’s always a story happening that Agent Jones or the Seven are doing, and a lot more that only a few could see.
In short, instead of the character driving the game story forward, they created the world – the island driving the story forward. So, we can say the powerful tool used for the narrative of Fortnite is environmental storytelling, in which players dropping by to roam around and playing the shooting game, would write their own story for the game.
So, unlike other games with stronger plots, Fortnite gave that power to the hands of players to carve.
| 📝 Learning from this strategy is not to follow as it did, but to find the hook that your potential gamers would like to remember, strategize, and then come back stronger. |
Always Experimenting with Visuals
After the award-winning storyline, the graphics, animation, and transitions in the game also play a vital role in the game’s success factors. And Fortnite set its standard by creating a combination of cartoonish and stylized game art overall popular game art styles. Because it gave the team Fortnite the freedom to experiment with their unique ideas.
These are the core highlights for any game. And the Fortnite team took the experiments on graphics and animation very seriously. They never missed out on any opportunity to flourish their skills to innovate.
We personally find this Fortnite: Food Fight (Burger Vs. Pizza) campaign the most innovative one, along with their amazing marketing strategy to make every curious enough to start a big controversy.
They also take festive seasons and other controversial events and collaborations as an opportunity to create limited editions for in-game purchases. The Marvel Edition, Marshmello concert, and Christmas editions are some of the most controversial themes of Fortnite, and Travis Scott’s astronomical event collaboration with it – has helped boost game adoption and business.
| 📝 Learning from Fortnite’s visual strategy would be to never miss an event such as Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, or any controversial ones worthy enough to turn into amusing visuals to make your game look more appealing and an excuse to set up the trendsetting marketing campaign. |
Community-building Approach
For the game creators, having a dedicated community of gamers is more like a blessing. As the EPIC game studio already had a big dedicated community of gamers, it wasn’t that hard for them to divert their attention to their new game. Still, for the just debuted game, it’s a bit of a challenge.
To win the hearts and minds of gamers, Fortnite included the following alluring elements in the game:
- Characteristic comic-like graphics, characters, and their functions, such as dance.
- Modes of competitive and casual gameplay.
- Skill-based matchmaking in the game opponents for the gameplay.
- As this game is totally player-driven, every time they get to play this game from different angles.
- Making the game cross-platformer, supporting PC, Play Stations, and Xbox.
- Constant efforts on adjusting the game content, marketing push, and a lot more to spread the game awareness.
- Contribution with well-known game streamers, like Richard Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins, with 16M+ followers on Twitch (then), who streamed Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster (an NFL rookie) to get gamers’ attention.
- Planning for bigger eSports tournaments and inviting professional gamers to compete against and win amazing bumper rewards.
These were just a few famous strategies of Fortnite to build a massive community of dedicated gamers, they have used thousands of others as well.
| 📝 So, learning from Fortnite’s gamers’ community-building strategies would be to understand your target gamers and their liking areas and then plan the game graphics, animation, tournament, and other things accordingly. |
Game Monetization Models
You might know, still, you’ll be curious to know, “How does Fortnite make money?” And it’s quite obvious.
So, Fortnite makes money by selling the following in-game services and premium access:
The Battle Pass
This is the major revenue-driving strategy. So, basically, it’s a seasonal pass, allowing players to get into specific challenge-based battles, like collecting a number of headshots or landing on a particular location, to compete and earn alluring rewards. Here, rewards can be XP, abilities, and points to climb tiers.
In-game Purchases
These are the freemium monetization models, allowing individuals to buy new costumes, cosmetic weapon skins, and much more to satisfy their game fashionista wishes.
Merchandise
It’s also one of the best strategies for driving revenue. As the name suggests, it enables players to buy its merchandise, such as T-shirts, shoes, bags, caps, etc., to wear and show their love for this game. This is also a cool technique for the branding/marketing of Fortnite through its community, motivating others to join this clan.
Subscriptions
As the name suggests, just like OTT subscriptions, this subscription is termed Fortnite Crew, which offers V-Bucks, Battle Pass access, and exclusive items. Players interested in accessing premium rewards can purchase for certain periods and then renew it to continue taking the benefits of upscaling their gameplay.
Apart from these, with every model, they have taken care of the main motive of their gaming business to thrive in the market as a leader and trendsetter.
| 📝Learning from this Fortnite monetization strategy would be to focus on: – The design choices (for example, Fortnite follows a cartoonish art style, Free Fire follows a combination of realistic and stylized art style, and Valorant mostly follows a stylized art style with a combination of realistic and visually distinctive aesthetics), adds a plus point on revenue generation. – Becoming a trailblazer in preparing items that any gamer would want to buy. – Creating strategies to plan the progression system for the game. – Creating scarcity to make players desperate to buy that item, such as limited-period offers, festive items, special collaboration editions, etc. – Apart from all these, as you’re launching your new game, you can also run amazing marketing campaigns for the “Pre-order.” |
Amazing Game Marketing Strategy
You are not the only one but many game creators out there are interested in knowing, “Fortnite’s marketing strategy that has helped them bring in 350M+ players and billions in revenue.”
During the pre-order campaign, Fortnite’s marketing team reached out to NINJA – a Twitch gaming influencer, to play the game early on with celebs to motivate others to pre-order and play.
They marketed it with tweets like,
Not just that, even Drake admitted to playing Fortnite with his crew, which created a lot more hype amongst the gamers’ community.
This created FOMO in the minds of passionate video gamers and made them pay $39, even if it was free-to-play, just to get early access before its planned release.
They even invited journalists writing articles for game columns to play Fortnite and review it to boost their brand awareness campaigns to support Pre-release sales.
They even targeted music artists, like Marshmello’s concerts held in the game, designed with custom graphics in the Fortnite theme and amazing effects that mesmerized everyone to attend this game.
After this, the mouth marketing campaign was successful in that many existing players brought their gamer friends to play.
Apart from this, Fortnite being a free-to-play CTA became the most player-driving strategy for its paid campaigns to get success to reach more and more.
| 📝Learning from Fortnite’s marketing strategy would be to do it in full force by not just waiting for the opportunity to push it public but by creating opportunities to make other people talk about your game. Of course, being one of the leading game development companies, EPIC Game Studio had a lot of budget to spare to invite industry experts. Still taking in its approach, you can actually come up with some ideas that may help you market your game in an effective way. In this, getting help from a specified game marketing company would be great. |
How Can 300Mind Help You Create A Successful Game Like Fortnite?
Fortnite had to be a successful game as its creators have gone the extra mile while creating it. This also sets an example for you to go the extra mile for your game to become the next hot favorite game of gaming enthusiasts. Of course, you need the help of a top game development studio like 300Mind.
At 300Mind, we bring your game development aspirations to life. Our expert team is dedicated to guiding you through every step of the process, from concept to execution. With a proven track record of success, we offer unparalleled insights, cutting-edge strategies, and a wealth of experience along with components to accelerate time to market, we ensure your game not only stands out but dominates the market.
Contact us today to let us be your creative partner, empowering you to create a game that captivates audiences, fosters community engagement, and achieves the level of success enjoyed by industry giants like Fortnite.
FAQs on A Fortnite Game Strategy
Fortnite has many factors that make it a successful game, from all its unique gameplay, free-to-play game model, up-to-date gaming content, youth-appealing aesthetics, stylized characters, the constant evolution of the map, amazing campaigns, and foolproof in-game purchases play an essential role.
As Fortnite belongs to the battle game genre, its strategies will work very well for the game of similar genres. However, games from other genres can utilize some of the strategies, like marketing, art style, visuals, and community-building approaches.
Fortnite’s success is partly attributed to its strong community focus. Incorporating features like events, social interaction, and feedback mechanisms with alluring visuals can help to build and sustain a dedicated player community.
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