Introducing Fortnite

Fortnite is a free-to-play Battle Royale third-person shooter. A strictly multiplayer experience available on PC/Mac, Consoles, mobile. A Battle Royale is a survival style game where the last player or squad standing wins. 100 players play per game and drop on to an island. The playable space slowly shrinks forcing players to converge and giving one lucky player the Victory Royale!

Fortnite combines a whole range of gamification, and game design features. We’re going to talk about a few of the major features we think you could use in your business.

A Promotional Game

You might not know this but EPIC who created Fortnite: they aren’t traditional game developers. It’s not even the core of their business. They develop tools, and technologies, that allow other companies to make games. So they decided to show everyone and example of their business and created Fortnite.

Most people haven’t considered a game to show an example of their business. But it’s an incredibly effective tool, especially as a simulation. We created the M&A Game for Andsarada which gave people an insight in to mergers and acquisitions by emulating a game of their business.

Not only was the game fun, and engaging while showing how their business works. The lead generation result for Andsarada was incredibly successful.

If there was a simulation of your business, what would that look like? Could you make a promotional game?

Flow

If you’ve ever caught yourself doing an activity and time just melted away? You were probably in a state of Flow! Lots of game designers try and achieve this mental state for their users by creating repetitive tasks with clear challenges that you can learn and eventually master.

A term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi back in 1975. Flow refers to a psychological state where a person is in such a state of deep focus that they almost forget about the world around them. Things like painting, playing music, and martial arts, are all very repetitive and engaging experiences that can induce a state of flow.

Software as a Service

Fortnite is on track to make $3.5 billion in revenue in 2018. You might be surprised to hear that you can only buy cosmetic items, and every purchase doesn’t affect gameplay at all.

Fortnite implements a classic service based revenue model. Since the game is released for free they rely on regular updates, new content, new features and modes, all to keep people playing their game and making regular purchases.

Unlike a standard development model where you make a large scale investment followed by a release, sales results and watch it taper quickly... Software as a service models see a smaller investment up front to create what’s called a Minimum Viable Product. As you allow users to use your product you can adjust, iterate, and make changes as it develops.

Like we said in a previous article, Pokemon GO’s player base increased 35% since it’s release on iOS, two years ago! This is because they’ve been consistently adding new content, new features and supporting their community with events.

Other software as a services you might be familiar with are; Salesforce, Netflix, Dropbox, and Office 365. But it’s not just large companies doing it now. Even Headspace: Guided Meditation and Colouring Book for Me are services models.

Are your digital properties SaaS? If you’re considering a new product, please consider.

Community

Fortnites’ ability to engage with their community is truly next level. Their engagement gives their customers so much input on the development of the game, and it’s features, that they feel like they have a stake in the product.

One of the many cosmetic items you can unlock is a dance animation or ‘emote’. During one community competition Fortnite asked it’s community to send videos of a custom dance. One lucky winner would be selected and their dance featured in the game.

Once the winner was selected a small, and very vocal part of the community grew behind one submission. They had found one user who wore an iconic orange shirt, named the @Kid_Fortnite12, created a dance that wasn’t considered. Two weeks, 14,000+ signatures, thousands of retweets later the campaign of #OrangeJustice had officially begun.

Less than a week later the Orange Justice dance was added.

This level of engagement and content creation is incredibly rewarding to any community. Their voices being heard, and affecting the product directly, visibly, is so rewarding.

So how do your digital properties support your community?

Data

While most marketing arms will be generation Net Promoter Scores, asking for reviews and surveying people. But people’s perspectives can be changed based on when you ask, what information retrieval system you’re using, and so many other affects.

The difference with the data that you get from a digital product is, it’s all behavioural. You don’t need declarative surveys when you can see what the users are doing and how often they’re using it.

Nike + (plus) the running companion app, was a great way to track your workouts and compare it with friends. Nike’s stock prices rose 14% soon after it’s release. But it wasn’t the apps popularity that sold more shoes. It was the data they could see from there users. What shoes they bought. How they often they wore out. What region they were all in. Not to mention the lead generation potential.

Are your digital properties collecting the right data?

Feedback

Feedback is about the responses you get from a digital product to be able to track your status. While everyone’s fighting to win a Victory Royale there’s so many more ways that Fortnite give you feedback.

In an article by Forbes back in 2016 they reported that 65% of employees want more feedback. 58% of managers think they give enough. And four out of ten workers actively disengaged when they got little or no feedback.

We created Ignite for John Holland, an ideation platform, allowing users to come up with ideas and submit them to a forum. Most employees were thinking their ideas weren’t being heard, or management was getting in the way. But by creating a platform where users could vote for their favourite ideas, everyone instantly got the feedback they sought. The best ideas reached the top of the pile and saw real action.

Could your business do with more feedback? Are your digital properties giving feedback?

Final thoughts

While there’s a lot to cover in Fortnite - the important thing to remember is that any business can use one of these features. However Fortnite has executed them all so well, alongside an incredibly well produced digital product.

So when you think about your current or a new digital product don’t forget to consider:

Show off your business with a game, or simulation
Induce a state of flow
Operate ‘as a service’
Engage your community
Collect behavioural data
Give people feedback

Features of Fortnite Seminar: Wrap Up