Once upon a time, battle royale Fortnite was the game of choice for a number of highly prolific Twitch streamers, but its reign is showing signs of coming to an end, and one such streamer, Tfue, has a theory as to why many of his contemporaries are choosing to leave the game behind. In a recent livestream, Turner "Tfue" Tenney offers up some insight on why the sun is setting on Fortnite in the wake of other battle royales gaining enough popularity to usurp its throne.
Fortnite garnered unprecedented popularity when it first released in 2017, partially on its own substantial merits, but also thanks to celebrity endorsement by major film and television stars, pop culture characters, and prolific athletes. The resulting cultural impact of Fortnite meant that it soon became the game of choice for Twitch streamers, and for a privileged few, ultimately helped them garner massive fan bases and significant financial gains. Streamers like Ninja, Tfue, and shroud can all credit Fortnite for their overall success, as each had their mainstream breakthrough as players of the massively popular battle royale.
But while Ninja and Tfue have garnered over ten million viewers on Twitch to date thanks largely to their time on Fortnite, the two prolific streamers, along with a number of others, have gradually moved away from the game in favor of other popular titles, like Call of Duty: Warzone, Minecraft, and League of Legends. Tfue, on a live Twitch stream reported by Dexerto, offered his perspective on why Fortnite has seen an exodus of the most popular streamers: the ones with "somewhat of a personality" have realized that they can move on to other games, and their fanbase will still follow. In short, major streamers who started off with Fortnite are moving away from it because they're bored with it, and because they can, without losing or alienating their fanbase.
That isn't to suggest that popular streamers have hung up on Fortnite for good; Ninja has long since quit streaming the game competitively but confirmed in a recent tweet that he still loves the game and will continue to play it casually. But Fortnite has been around for nearly four years, and no matter how good a game is, playing it over and over for the majority of one's career is bound to get stale after a while. What Tfue and his contemporaries have realized is that their fans are watching their favorite streamers, not their favorite games, leaving them free to pursue other ventures.
It's not surprising that Fortnite's heyday is starting to come to an end — it's the nature of every trend to eventually go out of style, whether in gaming, fashion, or slang. But given the cyclic nature of gaming, in twenty years or so, it's likely that Fortnite will earn itself the "retro" label by some prolific streamer of the future, and enjoy another stint with popularity again.
Source: Dexerto