Recently, I sat down with a friend in the video game industry who offered some great insight into game development. Roblox and Fortnite are both gearing up for a war of attrition in a genre I don’t think any other game can enter: Everything. For years, Roblox has been the video game that allowed for infinite variations of gameplay, and it looks like Fortnite is throwing its hat into the ring.
Fortnite now has Lego, Rocket League, RP parkour servers, and pretty much every experience you can think of. So my question now is, where do the players fit into this?
Everyone
One of the edges that Roblox has over Fortnite, being in the genre of “everything” far longer than Fortnite ever has, is that it is open-source and flexible. Anyone who has the time and patience to learn how to create a game within the Roblox engine can create their own game with unique gameplay, models, mechanics, and of course, its own microtransactions. Community developers are incentivized to make something in Roblox because they can earn some sweet cash on the side. It gets a bit harsh when you have to shell out Robux for something as simple as a brighter flashlight, but what more can you ask for? It’s free after all.
Then again, Fortnite is also a free game that allows players to create custom game modes in the way they want. However, comparatively, Fortnite does not offer as much creative freedom for players as Roblox, which has its own developer tools. The games that the community can make for Fortnite will always be impressive mishmashes of existing mechanics and assets, and that’s not a jab at Fortnite at all. Because players have to use assets made for the Unreal Engine, every community game will always come out with a certain level of polish that matches the rest of the Fortnite experience.
Homunculus
Speaking of the Fortnite experience, the game has only grown bigger throughout the years. Games that are under the EPIC Games umbrella of companies are integrated into Fortnite, slowly becoming a Frankenstein’s monster of old and new video games. Rockband and Rocket League suddenly have their own versions within the Fortnite client, both of which use Fortnite assets now. Fortnite even has a few collaborations diving into different genres, such as the LEGO world, and now a few Disney collabs outside of the game. It even has a tactical FPS mode called Ballistic that is obviously trying to copy games like Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant.
But even still, Fortnite isn’t the biggest video game homunculus out there. Roblox still holds the top spot when it comes to churning out copycat games, recreating trending games such as Peak and Shinkansen 0 to almost identical results. Developers, such as the fine people at Landfall, have also taken notice of the so-called “microtransaction-riddled ripoff slop”, going so far as to suggest piracy over Roblox copies. Of course, you can look at this one of two ways, either as criticism against Roblox being slop, or good enough free copies for developers to take notice. Either way, Roblox has shown no signs of moderating copycat games (or games in general, to be honest), so it’s time to accept they’re here to stay.
Forever?
Now that I’ve laid out the landscape of this Everything war, it’s time to talk about how important it is to the industry as a whole. The continued expansion of Roblox and Fortnite, trying to cover every genre in the book, might be something that hurts the industry in the long run.
Roblox being called out as microtransaction ripoff slop is the harshest and loudest truth we’ve heard, and I honestly wish someone would step in. Of course, the copy will never be as good as the real thing, but this continued release and consumption of slop in the gaming industry might lead to lower standards for other games. It's happened with the film industry before, and I hope it doesn’t happen to the gaming industry, too. Plus, with the growing quality of Roblox rip-offs, there’s also the fear that they may be stealing sales from the developers themselves.
Fortnite becoming the Frankenstein’s monster of gaming is also very worrying because now I’m wondering if every game under EPIC will just be released within Fortnite. I was genuinely excited for Rock Band to come back as its own standalone game, and hearing that I have to download the entire Fortnite client to play it left a bad taste in my mouth. I know it’s a harsh complaint, especially since Fortnite has been free all these years, but the growing file size will always turn me off.
But this future might just be a pessimistic theory from me, especially at a time when both games are flourishing. Only time will tell what the outcome of this brewing Everything war will be, but I’ll keep my hopes up high and my head down low.
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