Power Trip

How ‘Fortnite’ Became Powerful Enough to Break Sony

The game that’s brought industry titans to heel

For decades, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft set the standard for how video game publishers did business. If a publisher wanted to release a video game and make money, it had to abide by the rules set by these console manufacturers. The same way Apple regulates what happens on the iOS store, the biggest gaming platforms regulated what happened on theirs.

Enter Fortnite. The game, which is just over a year old, is already profitable enough to trample competition. And unlike rivals, it’s conquering the industry on its own terms and dragging console makers into the future. On September 26, 2018, after prolonged pressure from Fornite players, Sony caved and announced an end to its longstanding policy of keeping its online player base separate from gamers on other systems; this is a major, unprecedented concession.

The decision to enable cross-platform play, or cross-play, knocked the gaming industry sideways as it geared up for its own version of Oscar season, with prestige titles like Fallout 76 weeks away from launch. At a recent press roundtable, one journalist asked Fallout publisher Bethesda about cross-play for its upcoming game. The team at the table shared knowing looks.

“The announcement that a company just made is a little late for us. It’s not just a checkbox we can edit in,” Jeff Gardner, project lead on Fallout 76, said of Sony’s recent move. “It’s not a light lift.”

Fallout is no Fortnite. Through sheer economic momentum, Epic, the company behind Fortnite, shattered Sony’s well-established rules for its massive PlayStation platform. And it hardly had to try: Sony’s greed was its own undoing.

Something strange happened in September 2017, shortly after Fornite’s launch.

For a few brief hours, PlayStation 4 players noticed they were playing against people on the Xbox One. Epic quickly disabled the feature when news got out. “We had a configuration issue and it has now been corrected,” the company told Kotaku at the time.

Consoles are typically closed systems; for instance, a gamer on the Xbox One can’t play against…