PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds took the world by storm early on in 2017 with its excellent battle royale design, and Fortnite took things one step further, to the point where battle royale seems to have become the next big trend in the industry. In fact, as per Michael Olson, who is a Senior Research Analyst at Wall Street firm Piper Jaffray, this is only the beginning.
Olson predicts that by the second half of 2018 (or the first half of 2019 in some cases), battle royale modes will be inserted into several other huge AAA games with the intent of mimicking the success of the aforementioned titles, as per a report on CNBC. Olson mentioned a slew of major AAA third party titles, such as Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption 2, Overwatch, Battlefield, and Anthem.
“We believe it is the ‘mode,’ not the game, that has attracted users to Fortnite and PUBG,” Olson said. “We, therefore, expect major publishers to win back engagement as this style of play is included in their existing title.” That definitely makes sense. We’ve heard quite a bit of rumours in recent months about how games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 might include a battle royale mode. In fact, not so long ago, we heard about Call of Duty potentially having one. Read about it here.