Around 2017-2018, there used to be a huge circlejerk online about how Fortnite was the dumbest thing ever, to the point where “Fortnite bad, Minecraft good” was part of the infamous Keanu Chungus 100 meme. Why did it get so much hate, and why did it stop?
Stuff that’s popular with any demographic - but especially mid teens and younger - gets hated on disproportionately when adults that are disinterested see it ‘invading’ their spaces.
At least that’s my take.
What I find really interesting is after the hate train ended it never had a resurgence in popularity like Minecraft did.
That might be because Fortnite had managed to become weirdly messy and bloated by the time that could happen, and was already somewhat degenerate/impure at launch. And unlike Minecraft, all the messy variation/complexity was right there on the surface, not part of a deep modding scene.
When I opened Minecraft, it didn’t make any effort to sell me a Borderlands skin.
That’s because neither actually got hit with a dip in playerbase due to the hate. The players were all happy. It was outsiders yelling at people to stop enjoying themselves. Eventually they moved on and the players just continued having fun.
I think Minecraft had lots of nostalgia to benefit it. If your only history with fortnite was hating it, you aren’t going to play it just for fun. But with Minecraft people had nice memories from when they were younger
I played Fortnite when it was a tower defense coop game. It was okay, nothing special. Then PUBG came out and it gained some popularity. Fortnite quickly copied this and went free to play. In a short amount of time, a game I kind of liked became overrun by children that were screaming into the microphone the entire game.
That was when I stopped paying attention to Fortnite at all. AFAIK, the hate never stopped.
I loved the TD version the moment it was announced. The devs tried to tell the community that the battle royale mode was “just an after-hours project” and they wouldn’t abandon the Save the World mode. Of course, they did.
That sucks. I’m just now learning that something other than the BR mode once existed. I would have been totally on board for a TD version of the game. Now that it’s all BR, I’m just -meh-.
You telling me people don’t hate fortnite now?
It was probably the extreme surge in popularity. Sustaining hate for something so innocuous is difficult long-term, so people lost interest. My son and I started in season 2, and he still plays with his friends. It’s a phenomenal social game.
That’s my guess anyway.
Because it was the new thing the kids were doing. Go back 10 years and you’d fine people shitting on Minecraft for similar reasons. Couple that with the fact that Fortnite effectively cartoonified PUBG and became bigger than it and you have a perfect storm. Similar to Counter Strike players who hate on Valorant for being cartoony. I present to you this now legendary copypasta that summarizes things:
valarante child game… look to cartoon grapfix to make kid player happy like children show… valarante cartoon world with rainbow unlike counter strike chad with dark corridorr and raelistic gun… valarante like playhouse. valarant playor run from csgo fear of dark world and realism
Tbh I never liked realistic graphics because they look ugly when bad, and highly distracting when “good.” Not judging people who prefer them though.
Same, much prefer cartoony artstyles
Minecraft had tons and tons of issues until Microsoft finally got Notch to stop writing code for it.
I’m not doubting that Minecraft and Fortnite had a lot of things to be criticized for as games for but the hate was not about the content of the games themselves but their presentation and who they appealed to.
For me/my group, originally Fortnite was a group PvE game with a legitimate storyline etc. The BR element got tacked on, got crazy popular, and along with loot boxes became the focus of the game to the detriment of the original product.
That’s what happened to me. I think I may have paid for the game when it had a story mode at a very early access stage. And then, over a very short period, it became a totally different game. And that annoyed me.
Oh yeah, ditto, we definitely paid for early access. It was kind of impressive just how fast they pivoted.
-
It was F2P so too many kids.
-
I still suck at build mode.
-
The astetics were weird but I got used to it and it makes spotting enemies easier when everyone’s a cartoon.
-
I got over Kratos and Xenomorphs dancing. It’s funny now.
-
I didn’t begin to “hate” Fortnite until Epic began throwing their dirty money around to aggregate unrelated personalities and sullying their otherwise spotless image. Something about Kratos doing ridiculous dances just rubs me the wrong way, and that’s only one example.
Beyond that, my “hate” also stems from Epic as a whole being a scummy business. You could say most large-scale games publishers these days are shady and act in poor faith, and you could argue that Epic is merely a consequence of the times and the environment they’ve grown out of. However, I won’t hold them to a different standard just because of that. Epic, EA, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, et cetera; I recognize all their shitty actions and want nothing to do with any of them anymore.
Personally I started on a bad foot for Fortnite when Epic shut down Paragon, which was an amazingly promising third-person MOBA and probably the only MOBA I’ve ever legitimately enjoyed, in favor of chasing Fortnite’s cash cow. One day I just log in to find that the servers were shut down, no refunds**, no releasing server software for people to stand up their own, just “nah we decided not to support this game anymore, fuck off nerds”
It’s only really tangentially Fortnite’s fault, if at all, and I already wasn’t going to like Fortnite because I can’t enjoy BR’s. But hearing that Epic suddenly shut down my favorite game they’ve made in order to relocate those resources into the Lootbox Apocalypse populated with preteens, really soured me a lot on the whole idea.
At this point in my life, years later, I’ve seen enough 8 year olds doing Fortnite dances in Walmart to know that I won’t be able to connect with the user base, I already know I don’t enjoy the basic premise of the game, and I’m not going to spend $12 to make my character look like Kratos or Rick Sanchez in a game I can’t stand playing full of people I don’t want to talk to. I’m not their target audience, and you know, that’s okay. I’ve gotten over my anger at Fortnite’s sheer existence and now I’m merely disappointed in it. But I was never going to ride this bandwagon anyway so Epic never had a reason to care about my preferences.
**Actually after some brief investigation it seems that Epic did in fact offer refunds for the game. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get one, but I think that was because I didn’t apply for it in time. Regardless, game go poof and I’d rather have had the game than my money back.
Hear! Hear!
The comment I’ve been looking for. Epic.
I heard all the hate and never gave it a shot but one day 3 years ago I watched my kid play it and it looked fun as hell, so i tried it out and it quickly became my favorite game of all time. Still play an hour a day or more
I dunno. If you don’t have comms on and play solo its good for a fun lark now and again.
To be fair, it was overrated. But it was also overhated
Too many children.
For me, a lot of it came down to the fact that Epic Games more or less dropped Unreal Tournament 4 to focus on what appeared to be a low effort adaptation of PUBG slapped over another game, and in doing so basically ripped the heart out of deathmatch arena shooters, and all we got out of it was a game that didn’t excel at any specific thing beyond appeal to children.
At this point I’m still sour about UT, but Fortnite has gotten enough updating to its technology and graphics that I’m less angry about it pretty much becoming Unreal Engine’s flagship game and more angry about what it represents. The game has always been fine.
It stopped?
I’m sure different communities have different reasons for hating Fortnite. I think the primary reason in the communities I run in is that Fortnite used to be a completely different game that was perpetually in development. Then, PUBG popularized the battle royale formula, and Epic sorta just copied that into Fortnite and gave it away for free to essentially steal the audience that PUBG had built.
I don’t really play multiplayer games, so I didn’t have a dog in the fight. I can understand the hate though. It must be hard to watch the game you love start to bleed players because a massive corporation copies their product, gives it away for free, and makes it up on the back-end by letting players pay to look like popular characters they have emotional attachments to.
I guess the reason it stopped is because it’s just hard to sustain hatred for a product for long.
