Epic stunned observers when they announced that they were moving into esports in a big way, offering $100 million in Fortnite esports prize pools this year alone, including $8 million dedicated to the next few weeks of a “Summer Skirmish” series, which pits streamers and top players against each other.
But last week, the first Summer Skirmish Fortnite event was a disaster. With players pulled from all over the world, playing on NA servers, the games were crippled by lag to the point where Epic had to actually end the event after just four games, somehow declaring a winner despite the fact that no one had won the requisite two victory royales that was supposed to signal the end of the duos contest.
What struck me about the matches however was not necessarily the lag, but how flat-out dull it all was. With so much on the line, $50,000 for first place and $250,000 in total prizes, these kinds of events paired with the kind of game Fortnite fundamentally is encourage caution over exciting gameplay. What that means is a lot of camping in towers or in elaborately constructed ground mazes, and not a whole lot of action. For most of the games I watched Tfue’s stream, a guy who is supposed to be one of the best players in the world, but probably 90% of his games were simply him finding the best place to hide on the map, before repositioning to do it again and again as the storm circles shrank. This isn’t to say he’s a cowardly player, but this is what the game demands with high level play in events like this.
This is not how things work when you watch Fortnite generally, however. Fortnite is extremely fun to watch on streams when it’s top tier players going up against the general population. There, the main goal is to put on a show for viewers, and that combined with the overall skill level of players like Ninja, DrLupo, Myth, Courage, etc, results in some extremely entertaining matches that combine humor, action and high-performance play.
Similarly, there have been Fortnite “events” that are still fun, even if it’s not just watching pros stream against randoms. Ninja threw a really fun event in Vegas where he played against other streamers and some fans, but it was centered around him and his appeal specifically. We watched his stream, we watched other players try to collect a bounty on his head. A fun event, but about as far removed from “esports” as you can get.
A hugely popular weekly event not thrown by Epic is Keemstar’s Fortnite Friday competition, where the prize money is relatively low compared to these huge Epic events ($10-20,000 to the winners), but the event itself is far, far more entertaining. The tournament pairs YouTubers and streamers on a team, and makes it a 2v2 points match where each half of the squad has to rack up as many kills as possible in a game, literally hunting the general player population for sport. This may not always end in wins, but it does encourage survival as if you’re dead, you can’t keep getting kills, but the key idea is that it makes the matches entirely about action, since kill totals are the most important objective.
Again, however, this is a fun event and still not “esports.” Epic can’t really make this the official format of Fortnite esports going forward. It would be like setting pro Starcraft players loose at Bronze Rank and seeing how many players they could tear through on a race to Grandmaster. Entertaining? Sure, but not esports in the way 1v1 tournaments against other pro players are.
The fundamental problem is that when you put a bunch of top tier Fortnite players together with traditional rules, the nature of the game where you’re trying to be the last man/team standing means that everyone is going to play incredibly conservatively with only one life to lose and so much at stake. But the games this system creates are unbearable to watch most of the time, lag issues aside. We see roughly double the normal amount of players left alive in safe circles as the storm shrinks, everyone boxed into their own little structures, only fighting when they absolutely have to. Epic saw this coming and tried to offer a $6,500 bounty to the team who got the highest kill total every match, but that clearly didn’t work, and you can’t really bribe your way to excitement in a game.
I’m not exactly sure where this road leads. I’ve heard some people saying that perhaps Blitz should be the official esports mode of Fortnite, given how much that would speed things up. I’ve heard others say that Epic should just adopt the Fortnite Friday hunting model, given how much more entertaining it is, but it’s hard to see them doing that. But this is why they’re stuck, it’s hard to see a good answer here. Fortnite is a great game to play and a great game to watch streamers play when there’s nothing at stake but entertaining fans. But esports is a whole different story, and no matter how much money Epic throws at this, there are some fundamental problems here that really need addressing.
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