We recently had a call with Frank Villarreal, CEO of esports organisation Rogue, and during our conversation we asked about how much goes into investing in a new team, at which point Villarreal explained about Battle Royale games specifically, including an interesting trend he's noticed with regards to Fortnite.
"Well it really depends on the game, to figure out what kind of team you want," he explained. "Generally with Battle Royale games my formula has been focused around finding people that I think could be very good influencers, because the game has so much RNG in it [randomness, variable elements in-game] that you're really never gonna have consistent results. The best you can hope for is a team that's consistently within the top 10 teams in the world, because there is no dominant team in a Battle Royale game. No one's really figured out that formula yet to have consistent success, so finding larger influences and having entertainers is a really important aspect to Battle Royale."
"With traditional esports you want the most competitive, the most consistent team you can get, that's going to get the best results, so it kind of depends on the game. I think that that's shifting in the Battle Royale scene right now. You know, when I look at competitive scrim results for the different Battle Royale games, I see that the number one H1Z1 team will maybe win 25 to 30 percent of the time. The best PUBG team will win 25 to 30 percent of the time. The best Fortnite team will win 55 to 60 percent of the time, so that tells me there's an added skill gap with Fortnite that H1Z1 and PUBG don't have, and it's pretty clearly the building aspect and destructible buildings which keeps the flow of the game moving and allows people to not just immediately die when they're caught out."
"So that added skill gap has added a lot of ability for consistency in Fortnite that PUBG and H1Z1 don't have. I think we'll see the Battle Royale scene continually evolve and eventually get to a place where there's a high enough skill gap that games are more consistent."
Do you think Fortnite's consistency in results makes it better to watch both as an esport and as a game in general?