The rise of battle royale games has been one of the most significant events in gaming history in recent years – in a matter of few years, a genre virtually non-existent, went on to be one of the most profitable and produce video games that have virtually dominated the market for the last two years. How did this happen? Will this trend continue? We’ll try to answer these questions in this article.
The Early Years
For the first part of gaming history, most games were single player, and there was no significant way for gamers to communicate and play with each other. Games like Pokemon Red allowing you to trade Pokemons with your friends were considered revolutionary and ingenious by their time’s standard, but that all changed with the release of the PS3 and Xbox360.
These consoles had the technological capacity and the horsepower to be able to deliver an Okayish multiplayer experience. While the first few years saw very little games exploiting those capabilities, as time went on, games like Call of Duty and Battlefield became the best selling games ever, and even people that weren’t interested in games tried them. Although these games can’t be classified as battle royale games, they certainly were precursors. The early games would allow 8 players to compete in a single map, and then that number rose to 16, and it was a very big deal when Call of Duty announced they’d let 32 players compete against each other in a single map. Providing various modes, these games could provide something no game has been able to do before. unpredictable human players that were fun to play against – you no longer needed to suffer playing against dumb and glitchy AIs, but you could play against and communicate with players all around the world in a matter of minutes, and this was extremely popular.
The Development of Battle Royale Games
You might be asking yourself, why didn’t battle royale games get popular sooner, then? Weren’t people into it back then? There are two main reasons this didn’t happen:
The tech just wasn’t there: the fact that Activision was capable of designing a call of duty that allowed 32 players was a huge deal in the gaming world was mentioned before, and that’s all you need to put things into perspective. Our machines and internet were just not capable of putting 64 or 128 players on a large map and letting them duke it out to their hearts’ content. At most, you’d have a small and bland map where 16 people would fight to the death, and this doesn’t really have the same appeal.
The gaming community needed time to adjust: as singleplayer was the dominant way of creating games for so long, people needed time to get used to multiplayer-only games. The idea that you can buy a game but you can only play it online was unheard of outside a few MMOs, which is a niche genre, to begin with. The shooter games that had a story campaign were a nice precursor that allowed the genre to develop slowly and be able to compete with singleplayer games. They were the middle of the road, and without them, we probably wouldn’t have these games today.
These two things changed with the release of the current generation of consoles. We had access to awesome technology, and the people were in-love with online games already.
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