If you are releasing a game in 2018, you better have a Battle Royale mode otherwise gamers may take up pitchforks and raid your studios for golden chests and health potions. Just kidding, but if you want to make some extra cash – it might be worthwhile adding the 100 man free-for-all into your game.
Take-two the publisher of Rockstar Games is no newbie when it comes to successful monetization – but with the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2, this isn’t the primary focus.
In an interview with Game Daily, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that while they certainly aren’t ruling out having a battle royale mode in Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s not something they are dedicating all their time to as “No one wants to be a Fortnite clone”
“We’ve used battle royale mechanics before,” Zelnick said. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but any mechanic you use would want to be in service of the core entertainment experience and would be consumer-focused. It wouldn’t be driven by revenue focus in our view. And if one is overly derivative of another’s success, you pretty much guarantee you’re not going to have your own success, because no one is looking for a clone of Fortnite. I wish we had Fortnite — we don’t — so wishing we had Fortnite is not going to help me.”
“That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t use a mechanic that’s in other games,” he continued. “We’re certainly not averse to using something created by someone else in service of a good experience in our own games. So there are moments when you might choose to be derivative for some small portion of a game, but I think there’s a lot of emphasis on questions that have been posed more pointedly by some which is, ‘Hey, look at Fortnite, shouldn’t everything you do be some example of Fortnite?’ The answer is absolutely not. If we turned an upcoming release into a sad, diluted version of Fortnite, I can assure you it would fail, in addition to being embarrassing [for the brand].”
Red Dead Redemption 2 launches on October 26 for the Xbox One and PS4.
