 Fortnite is the biggest game on the planet right now. Even if you don't play games that much, you've probably seen a Fortnite clip or two on social media and heard about the game's meteoric rise. But beyond being super popular, the game is also incredibly important to the future of the industry. Fortnite is impacting how modern video games are developed and how they get popular, stay relevant, and make money. So, what's the secret to its success? Let's take a look at the ingredients of Fortnite that have turned it into such a big hit and how that formula is changing pretty much everything about online games in 2018. What you might not know about Fortnite is that it's been cooking for a while, years in fact. The game was announced way back in 2011, and when it finally launched last summer, it didn't even include the Battle Royale mode that has made it so popular. The developer, Epic Games, saw a big opportunity to capitalize on a trend set by the game PUBG, and so it iterated quickly and released a version of Fortnite that pitted 100 people against one another in a big, sprawling environment. The result is that now, Fortnite is played by tens of millions of people, and it makes a fortune for Epic every month. In April, the game made $300 million. That's more than the new Avengers movie made in its opening weekend. This game has gotten so big that some people in the industry think Fortnite may become a generation-defining title. Think something like Minecraft. So, what makes Fortnite special? Why is it so successful and popular, and why are people spending so much money on it? The answer there is a bit complex. It involves delving into how video games typically get made and how they make money. Also, how that process has been changing over the years. For Fortnite, it's important to understand that it's not doing anything super new. It's not the first free-to-play game, certainly. Mobile games, predominantly from Asia, figured out years ago that if you gave away a game for free, you could charge players small amounts of money to make their characters look unique. Fortnite is also not the first game to be treated as an evolving service instead of like a one-off product. Games like Destiny, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, they've been doing this for years. But most importantly, Fortnite isn't even the first battle royale game. They copied most of the gameplay from PUBG, which itself is based on earlier game mods like DayZ. But Fortnite is the first free-to-play battle royale game that is updated almost daily. It's super polished, runs well on basically every platform, including phones, and it has a very cartoony art style that appeals to all ages, which is great for parents who are worried about video game violence. The ingredients were all there, and Epic was just the first one to do it well. They didn't set out to make the biggest game in the world, but they did anyway, because they were willing to take risks and evolve. If you play a lot of games like me, you're probably hooked on Fortnite. And like me, maybe you've spent a little bit of real money on the game, or maybe a lot of real money. So here is my whole vault of emotes that I've bought. There's of course the disco dancing one to go with my disco dancing character. There's also the floss dance. You can even do the Snoop Dogg, drop it like it's hot dance. So why are we, you and me, spending so much money on a free video game? Well, in Fortnite, most of the money that you spend is spent on accessories, like costumes and hang gliders and pickaxes that don't help you do any better at the game, but they do help you stand out on the battlefield. You can make yourself look like a swamp monster or a disco dancer, or even Keanu Reeves from John Wick. You can also spend money on what are called emotes, which is just industry speak for really silly dance moves. Epic is particularly good at designing new emotes. They're always pulling from popular memes and encouraging the community to even submit their own. This actually saves in the game. I'll probably crap my pants. But where Epic was really smart was in creating a system for players to unlock some of these items without spending any real money. They do this by borrowing a lot from role-playing games, where you use XP to level up and you complete challenges to progress. It's essentially a system that rewards players for investing more time. For instance, Epic sells a three-month subscription service for $10 called the Battle Pass with its own set of unique rewards. And only by playing the game pretty much every single day can you unlock every costume and dance. I subscribed to the Battle Pass for three seasons in a row now because I play at least a little bit every day and it made sense. Also, I needed the John Wick skin because reasons. Epic is always adding new and wild stuff to the game for free, like jet packs and shopping carts and new experimental game modes that keep it fresh every week. Lately, they've been going even further by crafting elaborate storylines for Fortnite, like the meteor crash that happened last month that give players lots of narratives to invest in and talk about online. So sure, the game is done really well, people love it. But does that mean that every game in the future is just gonna be a reskin of Fortnite? No, there will always be a place for those big franchise games that come out once every few years and really make waves, like Grand Theft Auto or Zelda or The New God of War. But because Fortnite is so popular, it's hard to imagine the best bits of it won't be copied by gaming's biggest players. This is something totally new. This is doing Battle Royale the Black Ops way. And in this day and age, the most popular games, the ones that people talk about and play every single day, they absolutely need to be fun to watch. And Fortnite is an amazing spectator sport. It's everywhere on social media, with clips flooding Reddit and Instagram and Twitter. Fortnite viral moments, they're legendary in the community. And it's really, really huge on YouTube and Twitch. Take Tyler Ninja Blevins, the most popular Twitch streamer in the world. Ninja, who's a former Halo pro, ditched his eSports career just when Fortnite was getting big. And by the spring, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month playing Fortnite for upwards of 12 hours a day on Twitch. Then in March, Ninja played with Drake. Yes, that Drake. It was a huge milestone for Fortnite and gaming culture. And it happened in the middle of the night with no promotion, nobody really saw it coming. And yet, more than 500,000 people tuned in to watch it live. It really marked the moment when Fortnite felt like it was going mainstream. With so many people playing this game, these streams have gigantic built-in audiences. And Fortnite is creating a whole new class of internet celebrity on YouTube and Twitch. That's because for the really good players, Fortnite is a great tool for creating viral clips of high-skill plays and other really shareable moments. For you or me, watching somebody else play Fortnite is just as entertaining as watching a TV show or a sport. And if you watch, you might just learn a few things too. So the game industry has watched all of these shifts happen over the years. The push to make games more streamable, to turn them into free-to-play platforms, and everything else that Fortnite has really mastered. Now, all these companies are trying to make sense of it and adapt. But just as Fortnite came out of nowhere last fall and surprised everybody, some new game or concept might do the same to Fortnite. The battle royale genre won't be the hot new thing forever. And game design nowadays is all about copying, iterating, and finding a new way to do something better. For Epic, if it wants to continue making the most popular game in the world, it cannot get complacent. They have to remember that taking risks, experimenting, and listening to players is why Fortnite got so big in the first place. For the rest of the industry, it would be smart not to just copy Fortnite, but to really learn from Epic's willingness to adapt. That might be the most important lesson to learn from Fortnite's success. For more gaming news and stuff about Fortnite and better flossing, check out polygon.com. Where they're better at dancing. All right, good. I'm really hot in this jacket.