Fortnite launches ‘Chapter 2’ after Call of Duty challenge

Google ships Pixel 4 without Daydream VR support

NEW YORK, Oct 21, (RTRS): Epic Games has launched a “Chapter 2” reboot of its battle royale smash hit “Fortnite” last week, drawing the eyeballs of millions of gamers globally as it bid to halt defections to rivals “Apex Legends” and “Call of Duty”.

The new version of the game features 13 new locations, water gameplay where characters can swim, fish and ride motorboats as well as new places to hide and a host of new avatars and guns.

The changes, hashtagged #FirstDrop, were received well by gamers, with ‘Fortnite is back’ trending on US Twitter with 13 thousand tweets.

Nearly 80,000 tuned in to watch the new game being played live by gamer Turner “Tfue” Tenney on video game live-streaming platform Twitch, less than two hours after its launch.

Fortnite and its early rivals, Tencentbacked “Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds” (PUBG), popularized an arena-style battle royale survival concept where 100 gamers are dropped onto an island to fight each other to the death.

The games are free to download and play but users pay for upgrades, like the “skins” displayed on characters. Fortnite raked in $2.4 billion in revenue in 2018, more than any other single title, according to Nielsen data.

The runaway successes of the games prompted Electronic Arts to launch its similarly-themed Apex Legends earlier this year and competition continues to mount.

The mobile version of Activision’s long-running “Call of Duty” franchise launched on Oct 1, and has already racked up 125 million unique downloads and more than $28 million in gross player spending, according to data website SensorTower.

Shares in Activision, EA and Grand Theft Auto-maker Take-Two Interactive Software all inched higher in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Fortnite publisher Epic was worth $15 billion when it last raised capital from investors last year.

Google is effectively phasing out its Daydream virtual reality (VR) platform: The company’s latest flagship Pixel 4 flagship phone, which Google unveiled at a press event in New York Tuesday, won’t support Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform anymore, a spokesperson confirmed to Variety.

The company will also stop selling the Daydream viewer, but continue to support Daydream for existing users. “There hasn’t been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped, and we’ve seen decreasing usage over time of the Daydream View headset,” the company’s spokesperson said via email. “So while we are no longer selling Daydream View or supporting Daydream on Pixel 4, the Daydream app and store will remain available for existing users.”

Google already omitted Daydream from Pixel 3a, the budget-priced phone released earlier this year. At the time, some had suspected that Google may want to reserve Daydream support for its higher-end phones. But now, Daydream is effectively being phased out; not a single phone released in 2019 supports the platform.

“We saw a lot of potential in smartphone VR – being able to use the smartphone you carry with you everywhere to power an immersive on-thego experience,” Google’s spokesperson explained. “But over time we noticed some clear limitations constraining smartphone VR from being a viable long-term solution. Most notably, asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose access to the apps they use throughout the day causes immense friction.”

Google launched Daydream in 2016 as the company’s answer to Samsung’s Gear VR headset. It allowed consumers to access VR simply by putting their phone into the cloth-covered Daydream viewer. However, support for Daydream had always been limited to just a few phones, including

Google’s own Pixel phones. Without support from key industry players, usage remained low.

Limited engagement and a small addressable audience also led a number of publishers to pull back support from Daydream. HBO discontinued its Daydream apps earlier this year, and Hulu dropped support for Daydream over the summer. And in June, Google itself discontinued Google Play Movies for Daydream.

Google’s phase-out of Daydream is just the latest retreat from VR for the company. Earlier this year, the company shut down its Jump cloud-based stitching service for 360-degree video footage. A VR camera jointly developed by Google and Imax never saw the light of day, and the company’s VR180 video format seems to be stalling, with key hardware partners dropping out.

Internally, Google has refocused much of its resources on augmented reality, something that Google’s spokesperson also stressed in the statement provided to Variety Tuesday: “We’re investing heavily in helpful AR experiences like Google Lens, AR walking navigation in Maps, and AR in Search that use the smartphone camera to bridge the digital and physical worlds, helping people do more with what they see and learn about the world around them.”