Epic Games is moving some of its development team from its struggling MOBA Paragon to its runaway success Fortnite.
In a highly unusual move for a game developer, Epic Games posted an open discussion on the Paragon subreddit last week to discuss the state of the game. In it, Epic admitted that Paragon hasn’t grown nearly as much as they’d like, and even revealed it’s still not a sustainable game, which is why they’re moving developers to the vastly more successful Fortnite.
“Our efforts have always been focused on growing the game,” wrote Epic on Reddit. “While each of [Paragon’s] incarnations has been beloved by a core community, none has been large enough to achieve mainstream success. This, combined with the humbling success of Fortnite has caused us to question if we have a good path to grow Paragon and make it thrive."
Paragon is Epic’s third-person battle arena game - think Smite - where players assume the role of a character and duke it for supremacy. It was released in March of 2016 and remains in open beta as the developers figure out a way to get the game’s player count up. It’s already gone through several revisions, but “no iteration has yet achieved that magical combination of ingredients that make for a sustainable game."
Meanwhile, Fortnite has turned into a smash hit after the release of its controversial Battle Royale mode. By the end of August, Fortnite had just 1 million players to its name - a successful number, certainly, but hardly a blockbuster. Then the game borrowed the 100-player free for all concept pioneered by PUBG, and it shot up to 10 million players after two weeks.
According to Polygon, Fortnite now has 30 million players across PC and all consoles and is still growing.
Considering Paragon has nowhere near as many players, it comes as no surprise the developer is shifting staff to deal with Fortnite’s success.
“The core challenge is that, of new players who try Paragon, only a small number continue to play regularly after a month,” the company said in its statement, adding that while they aren’t abandoning Paragon, updates will be slower in the future as they focus their efforts on Fortnite.
