Battle Royale war concluded. 2020 in video games industry - what future holds?
Table of Contents
In the end, all fads disappear. We already had a passion for early-access survival simulators, MMORPGs, Minecraft cloning, even RTS games reminded of their 90s legacy. The biggest fad was battle royale, but it seems to be coming to an end.
After the initial big boom that spurred many games of this type, the smallest ones dropped out, and the market split between a few big players with budgets to keep players interested. But even they are beginning to lose ground. In December 2018, PUBG was played by 1.1 million players in the peak moment. In December 2019, already "only" 700 thousand. Apex Legends had a great start, but the momentum was quickly shot down, and currently the title can no longer threaten Fortnite. Which is also slowing down – in September itself, the game's revenue dropped by 43%, introducing a pattern of systematic drops continuing year-round.
Players get bored and look for new sensations. The process is slow, because there's no new fads – Auto Chess, despite the challenges, could not achieve such success. However, nature abhors vacuum, and as soon as there's a bigger hit, it will seal the fate of battle royale. The largest games of this type will survive, as WoW survived the end of the MMORPG fashion. But the price for this is staying at the sidelines.
The only unpredictable variable is when this new fad will appear. Such booms are hard to predict by nature, they're often determined by chance. However, the chances that this will happen in 2020, they are quite large.
