LOS ANGELES, June 15 ― The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) wrapped up in Los Angeles yesterday with the video game Fortnite knocking out other contenders to emerge as the star of a show which highlighted the surging interest in competitive eSports.
Fortnite maker Epic Games has found a groove with its “battle royale” title in which scores of players fight against each other to be the last one standing in a post-apocalyptic world.
Fortnite was the focus of a pro-am tournament which packed a Los Angeles stadium during the annual E3 video game extravaganza and Epic Games has put up US$100 million (RM398 million) in prize money for competitions.
Reasons for the popularity of Fortnite include that it can be played for free on a range of devices including smartphones, personal computers and consoles. Nintendo added Fortnite to its Switch consoles this week.
“Battle royale is a proven and popular game style,” Twitch eSports programme head Justin Dellario told AFP.
Fortnite is the most popular game now on Amazon-owned Twitch, with more than six billion minutes of play in April alone, according to Dellario.
Hip-hop superstar Drake set a streaming record at Twitch in March drawing 628,000 viewers for a live stream of him battling for survival in the shoot-'em'-up adventure with players including Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, one of the emerging stars of the sector.
Fortnite became an eSports phenomena after the release late last year of a free Battle Royale mode that lets up to 100 players vie to be the last character standing on ever-shrinking terrain.
Players in the spotlight
Fortnite was crafted to be easy to jump into and fun including goofy stunts, for example, such as riding rockets or shopping carts, according to Celia Hodent, who worked on user experience at Epic Games before leaving late last year.
“There is no recipe for making for sure a game is a huge hit, but now you have specific ingredients you use,” Hodent, author of the book The Gamer's Brain, told AFP.
“What you are talking about is more a social phenomenon; when something is very popular then more people want to play it.”
The three-day E3 event, once restricted to members of the multi-billion-dollar video game industry, was open to gamers for the second year in a row with 15,000 tickets sold.
Throughout an E3 gathering rich with eye-popping game software, players themselves were in the spotlight.
