In 2018 and 2019, the online shooter Fortnite drove the gaming world crazy: With always new ideas and spectacular live events, it dominated discussions in gaming for over two years. Then something changed. The then-head of Fortnite, Donald Mustard, explains that Epic sacrificed the “magic of Fortnite.”
How did Fortnite dominate the gaming world back then?
- Fortnite: Battle Royale started at the end of 2017 and reached its peak in 2018. The game concept of Battle Royale, which was perfect for live streaming, was surely decisive.
- However, Fortnite had long-term success thanks to the “live events”: A story was told each season, and the world constantly changed. The game remained fresh.
- The climax of these live events was the end of Season 10 in October 2019, when the world of Fortnite ended with a big bang. 6 million people stared at a black hole at that time.
Epic sacrificed live events for the metaverse: “Devastating”
Why did they move away from it? The long-time lead creator of Fortnite, Donald Mustard, now talks in an interview with Gamefile about why they moved away from these live events. Apparently against the will of Donald Mustard, who left Epic Games about a year later:
“In mid-2022, Epic wanted to turn Lego Fortnite and Fortnite Racing, the new expansion of Fortnite, into a proper multi-game metaverse that was supposed to go online in December 2023. To develop all of these things, you need so many people and so much time. Basically, the event team was needed for other things. And that was devastating for me because I thought: ‘That is actually the magic.’ And not everyone at Epic agrees with that.'”
Players see different visions of Fortnite – The wrong one won
How is this being discussed? On reddit, people are discussing exactly the magic of these live events. Even today, players remember Chapter 1 when the island continuously changed in nuances, thus telling a story through environmental changes.
On reddit, one user believes that while everyone at Epic wanted the metaverse, they had different visions:
- The head of Epic, Tim Sweeney, wanted Fortnite as a platform for games like Roblox – with completely different games, different modes.
- Mustard wanted a single evolving world with large unique events.
Ultimately, Sweeney prevailed. Donald Mustard left Epic Games in September 2023 (via twitter).
Fortnite was also developed under a lot of pressure
What’s behind that: The timeline doesn’t quite match. Fortnite had already lost a significant amount of its hype well before 2022, as it clearly began to deflate after the Fortnite World Cup ended in the summer of 2019.
Mustard is surely right that the “magic” of Fortnite significantly decreased with the decline of live events, and the game no longer creates these highlights as frequently as before.
However, part of the truth is also that Epic Games worked on Fortnite at a crazy pace from 2017 to 2019 to keep bringing new content and items into the game. According to insider reports, this led to developers dropping out and suffering from burnout.
It is said that employees worked 70 hours a week back then, some even over 100. “Voluntary overtime” was expected.
According to anonymous employee statements, the bosses wanted to keep the hype of Fortnite alive for as long as possible and always bring a new patch.
After 2019, the development pace of Fortnite slowed down significantly.
Even though it is clear that Mustard is not a big fan of “Lego Fortnite”, the mode has nevertheless led to a resurgence:
LEGO Fortnite breaks the 2.4 million player mark – more than all other modes combined
