Fortnite Battle Royale
The idea for "Fortnite Battle Royale" arose following the release of the similar battle royale game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds", which saw numerous player count records broken throughout 2017. Seeing its rapid growth and commercial success, Epic Games saw the opportunity to create a battle royale mode of their own. Originally released as part of the paid "Fortnite" game, Epic spun out a dedicated version of the game offered as free-to-play funded by microtransactions, sharing in-game currency with the main "Fortnite" game, allowing players to buy or earn cosmetic items to customize their character, as well as completing challenges through a battle pass to earn additional rewards. , the game has seen over 200 million players, and has been estimated to have earned in microtransactions. "Fortnite Battle Royale" has become a cultural phenomenon, with streams of the game achieving record-high viewerships, and with several high-profile celebrities stating their appreciation of the game.
Fortnite: Save the World
As the game was at its very preliminary stages at the VGA reveal, the goal of this reveal was to seek public interest in the title and potential publishing partners as to decide on the game's release platforms and timeframe. During the July 2012 San Diego Comic Con, Epic announced that "Fortnite" would be an exclusive personal computer title, and the first one to be developed by Epic using their new Unreal 4 game engine, with a planned release in 2013. The game's development was originally started in the Unreal 3 engine, but as they progressed, they had seen the opportunity to work in several of the new feature sets and scripting language offered by Unreal 4 for "Fortnite", while still running on most personal computers at that time. They further opted for personal computer exclusivity to avoid the difficulty of having to go through console certification, and as they planned to be constantly monitoring and tweaking the game, acting as a dungeon master, the personal computer approach would allow them to do this without restrictions normally set by console manfuctures. Bleszinski later clarified that they would not rule out release on other platforms as they developed the title.
"Fortnite"s development was spread among several of Epic's satellite studios, and was also co-developed by the Polish studio People Can Fly, which had worked with Epic previously on earlier games, and had been fully acquired by Epic sometime in 2012. People Can Fly were briefly renamed Epic Games Poland in 2013 as to align with Epic's other studios. By March 2014, there were about 90 developers working on the game. People Can Fly later returned to being an independent studio and their own name in 2015, but continued to help Epic with "Fortnite"s development.