Google Stadia players hoping to play Fortnite on their game-streaming console have a hard pill to swallow. Epic Games provided a ruthless but valid justification for not porting its battle royale to the platform.
Google's streaming-based console has had a hard launch, and despite the availability of major titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Doom Eternal, gamers have been slow to embrace the beleaguered platform. It has yet to be seen whether other upcoming high profile Stadia releases, like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, will bring more players into the fold.
There is no question, however, that landing a Fortnite port would be a big win. With nearly 80 million monthly players, huge streaming audiences, and a talent for making headlines across the web, the popular build-and-shoot battle royale remains a bonafide phenomenon in 2020.
When queried on twitter, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, stated that there was no "deep reason" behind the game's absence on the platform. Stadia simply doesn't have the user base to make a port profitable. Crossplay is one of Fortnite's defining features and maintaining that functionality requires weekly updates to be synchronized across supported platforms.
Last March, Epic cut console cross-play from the Switch, pitting players against mobile users instead to ensure fights were fair, and player pools were deep enough. But adding Stadia as a platform for either pool would entail a great deal of development time and money, outweighing the potential gains.
There's little reason to doubt Sweeney's explanation, but it may not be the only reason Epic has declined to release on Stadia. Tencent Holdings LTD. owns a forty-percent stake in Epic Games, and is a direct competitor to Google in certain fields, like internet-based services and entertainment.
Even if there was a small profit to be made in porting Fortnite, the prospect of helping a competitor would likely tip the scales against adaptation. Even if this is a factor, Sweeney is unlikely to mention it however, as Epic has recently tried to distance, or at least distinguish itself from Tencent after facing accusations of the Epic Games Store hosting spyware for the Chinese conglomerate.
Even if Stadia's userbase exploded, Epic will be fine without catering to the platform. While the peak of the craze surrounding the game may have subsided, Fortnite is still a dominant force in popular culture that will endure for several years to come.
For now, Stadia players looking for a battle royale shooter would be best served by turning to the game that kicked off the trend, PlayerUnknown's Battle Grounds, which is currently available with cross-play. While the two titles have innumerable differences in mechanics, aesthetics, and tone, both games share the core "last man standing" conceit, and feature fierce gunplay across sprawling maps.
Fortnite is available now on Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.