They are more or less the Fortnite company. The Fortnite money printer churns out cash directly into the maw of the Epic Store money incinerator. This might turn out to be a great strategy in the long run but either way, they wouldn't be able to pursue it on this scale without Fortnite.
Epic games states that Fortnite has 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. It seems like this is the next step of social networking and I'm sure the connections are much more authentic than Facebook's.
>It seems like this is the next step of social networking
Many years ago I was playing Runescape and a friend quipped that MMOs are basically Myspace with a game attached to it. And I think he was right. MMOs live and die by the network effect. Runescape had 150 million user accounts something like a decade ago, if not even before that. I'm sure World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, and League of Legends had at least comparable numbers.
I think if this were the next step of social networking, then it would have already happened. Perhaps it already did? We just call them gaming communities. If that's the case, then video games have created competing social networks that exist at the same time and aren't just being eaten by the biggest one.
I would still expect that most people on FB have a higher number of ‘authentic’ relations there on average than someone who plays Fortnite has in-game. Unless all of your friends/family play it all the time as well.
I guess it depends where do you live, though. Where I’m from Messenger is still the most popular messaging platform so most people (unless they have very strong feelings about FB) have an account.
Location/demographic probably does have a rather large impact.
There are very few close relationships that I have on Facebook. I have it because I needed an account for a while, and haven't deleted it so that it can function as a placeholder should anyone try to impersonate me.
Meanwhile, almost all of my friends have a presence on Steam - including some who I rarely if ever do or have seen in person.
The great thing about this is that all the code / features they dogfood in Fortnite gets major improvements. Network play for example got a lot better simply because Fortnite ironed out lots of small, latency and scalability issues.
