Remember the old adage that less than 10% of a free-to-play playerbase pay for the other 90%? A poll conducted by LendEDU and Pollfish attempts to cast some shadow on that assumption. The groups say they surveyed 1000 hardcore Fortnite players and determined that almost 70% of them had spent money on the game – an average of $84 apiece for those who did, the majority of that on outfits and characters. More than a third of them had apparently never spent money on a game before.
However, it seems to have been a self-reported survey of highly invested people who identified Fortnite as their primary game, so it’s not really a fully random cross-section of all Fortnite players; one might assume that the type of people who consider themselves Fortnite fanatics and would answer a survey like this would be exactly the type to pay into the game and thereby skew the results.
That in mind, there are still some interesting bits in the infographic. Apparently, a solid 20% of people who bought Fortnite stuff assumed it gave them some sort of pay-to-win advantage (it does not in Fortnite). Whether that’s because we’re all inured to P2W or the urban legends of Reddit persist, I’m not sure. Additionally, a quarter of the players surveyed say they pay for Twitch to watch Fortnite and other games.
In other Fortnite news, The Conversation blog has a piece out describing Fortnite against the backdrop of the WHO’s ongoing stigmatization of “gaming addiction.” Author Andrew James Reid argues that players aren’t addicted to Fortnite; they are “fully invested and motivated to beat (or at least engage with) their opponents.” Reid invokes Jane McGonigal to assert that “games like Fortnite provide gratification in a way, as McGonigal wrote, ‘that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.'”
