Published on 12:00 AM, August 22, 2019

Overclock

Life cycle of a game

Since the 1980s, video games have been a popular form of entertainment and a big part of modern pop culture. Ever since the first video game, Pong came out, people have been going haywire to know what new thing they can bring. As time passed, many games have been released. Some lived for about a year or two. Others are still being played to this day.

SUDDEN FAME

When people make games, they read their audience. Most famous games end up being famous because of the new concept they bring. Let's take Player Unknown's Battlegrounds as an example. Following the release of Hunger Games, people were craving for a good battle royale game. Before anyone knew it, Bluehole jumped into development and made one of the greatest battle royale shooters of all time and it only cost USD 30. Very quickly, they became a multi-million-dollar company and were making truckloads of money everyday through PUBG. They became a monopoly in a few weeks by being the only good battle royale genre.

THE FALL

Icarus flew too close to the sun; his wings melted which caused him to sink to the ground. The same thing happened with Bluehole. As they got bigger, they crammed in more and more add-ons, loot boxes and swayed away from fan content. They thought they were unbeatable until one treacherous day, a new battle royale game had been released by Epic Games. Fortnite was a free to play kid friendly battle royale game. This allowed them to have a wider range of audience and plummet their sales. At first it didn't seem much of a problem but through the passage of time, people stopped buying PUBG. Before Bluehole knew it, they were in the bottom of the food chain and thus the game had died.

COMEBACK

Bluehole was getting worried; worried they'd be a forgotten franchise, worried they might go bankrupt. They started taking action and announced their game  on PS4 and Xbox but it was too late. Fortnite had become a behemoth and had taken their territory. The war was not over though. PUBG was too expensive of a game to be given for free on PC so Bluehole decided to go smaller. They decided to go mobile and free. Thus, PUBG is now one of the most popular and most played games on Android and iOS. It has 50 million players daily and 400 million downloads.

However, this story might not apply to all games. Battle Royales are the only games that are coming out nowadays. Recently there was a new game called Apex Legends that became a sudden hit and stole the crown from Fortnite. Epic Games were now scared. Respawn Entertainment dethroned them. Like I said, becoming too famous makes a person cocky and thus they made bad decisions. Respawn turtled and turtled and barely released any updates. After the disappointing season 1 of Apex, people were trying to move away. Epic Games had been trying to bring back their player base and so they started copying Apex Legends' game mechanics. They copied everything, starting from respawn beacons to ginormous supply ships filled with loot. After Fortnite learned about the hit Apex Legends took, they started giving free battle passes and this resulted to the death of Apex Legends. Fortnite had taken back the crown.

Well there you have it folks, a simple life cycle of dead video games coming to life. Speaking of that, Fortnite will have to die at some point and there is a giant behemoth that recently came back to life with the help of the biggest Youtuber PewDiePie. The game is known as Minecraft and it's catching up to the crown very fast.