PREDICTING THE NEXT, GREAT, BATTLE ROYALE GAME

All aboard the battle royale hype train.

If the gaming industry loves anything, it’s a trend to jump on: season passes, microtransactions, pre-order bonuses, loot boxes - your favorite developers have tried them all. This year’s E3 was packed with the industry’s latest obsession: the battle royale mode.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, the mode has its roots in player mods for ARMA 2 and Minecraft, but really took off as its own genre when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds became a surprise hit last year, pitting 100 players against each other in an open world arena last-man-standing ght to the death. Since then, every game from Dota 2 to GTA Online has made their own version of the mode, and you’ll soon nd it in the latest annual blockbusters including Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Battle eld V.

There’s no better example of the popularity of the genre than Epic’s Fortnite, which didn’t even begin life as a battle royale game, but somehow managed to pivot away from being an underwhelming mashup of Minecraft and Left 4 Dead and turn itself into the biggest game of 2018, with a 125 million player base that includes celebrity fans Drake, Travis Scott, and Joe Jonas.

So what’s the next big game to become a battle royale hit? We have some ideas.