Over the years, many games have been dubbed the most profitable or the most successful game of all time. While the title remains firmly in the hands of Minecraft and for a few years there have been many other games that I’ve been trying to take away its title. One such game is one that everybody knows about and has played and we are talking of course about Fortnite. But what makes Fortnite so successful and what drives so much money toward epic games? To understand why Fortnite’s business model has been copied and attempted in almost every game nowadays we need to understand why it works so well. So let’s take a look at Fortnite’s business model and owl their shop as managed to I’ll do every other game monetization since its launch.

It’s important to understand that when Fortnite launched battle passes and things like that did not exist just yet. We were in the era of lootboxes and cosmetic monetisation was already hitting that was in most online games. But a lot of people were becoming frustrated with loot boxes as the amount of randomness to them was not only unpredictable but impossible to counter or play against. This means that you could invest as much money and as much time as you wanted into getting a lot of lootboxes but it wouldn’t mean that you would get what you wanted from them. This was not only frustrating but many people started calling it out for what it is: gambling. You see the lootbox system was modeled after the gachapon system that already existed in Japan and while many games still maintain the system there have been legislations against lootboxes in European countries for example.

So there was this dilemma if you’re a video game company and you want to monetize your game in a certain way and want to avoid the bad Press of loot boxes what do you do? Having a cosmetics store is always a good thing and it will bring in a lot of money to a point where Fortnite V bucks have become a bit of an established meme at this point. But let’s say you want to make more money you want something that will keep players coming back and you want this engagement and this interactivity to apply to your monetization. This is where battle passes come in. Battle passes rely heavily on gameplay so it’s no wonder that Epic Games is doing its best to counter easy to install Fortnite hacks. So let’s take a look at what the battle pass is.

You see battle passes are not a straight exchange of money for a good. What the battle pass does is unlock a path for you to unlock more things as you play. But what is so brilliant about that you might wonder? It’s pretty simple actually, if a player pays to unlock things in the game and gets them immediately there is no real assurance that he will come back. What if the gamer buys the unlock of a battle bass he needs to come back every day to play so we can unlock more of the battle pass. Not only that but since he played he feels obligated to do it. This is brilliant because not only do you secure a new way of monetizing your game but you also secure player retention for at least over a month. So essentially you are offering cosmetics and unlockables in exchange for a player’s loyalty where you will come back every day to play the game so we can unlock more stuff he paid for.

Is that all it takes to make gamers spend money? No, it is not. But with this comes another great thing that goes right along with battle passes and this deep need to unlock things. You see the thing with battle passes is that more often than not they are time-limited which means that the unlockables in them are also time-limited. So if you’re a gamer and you see someone else with cosmetics you like the reality is that some of those cosmetics might have been an unlockable two or three seasons ago which means that you will never be able to get it. This is what we call the fear of missing out or FOMO. This is why battle passe