To celebrate Polygon’s 10th anniversary, we’re releasing a special edition: The next 10, a look at what games and entertainment will become in the next decade by some of our favorite artists and writers. Here’s freelance writer Jay Castello’s look at the future of the industry’s closest thing to a metaverse: Fourteen days.
To find out Fourteen days what it might look like in 10 years, one must first of all record what it is today. And that’s no easy task. A non-exhaustive list: Fourteen days is a cooperative survival tower defense game. Fourteen days is a wildly popular free-to-play battle royale that emphasizes building mechanics. Fourteen days is also a hugely popular free-to-play battle royale that has no building mechanics. Fourteen days is a streaming phenomenon that has given hundreds of entertainers successful careers. Fourteen days is an esport. Fourteen days is a destination for concerts, film screenings and dialogues about racing in America. Fourteen days is a tool for developers to create and share their own game modes. Fourteen days is a business that hopes to sell as many skins and cosmetic items as possible. Fourteen days is considered by many to be the closest thing we can get to a metaverse right now.
None of this is likely to get any easier in the next 10 years.
“It feels like Fourteen days is a shared game,” says video essayist Chris Franklin, whose video “The party that is a platform” addresses some of these tensions, particularly those between fun game, serious venue and for-profit product. “I don’t know how they’re going to square that circle.”
Fourteen days started as Fortnite: save the worldannounced in 2011 and released into Early Access in July 2017. But this tower defense game was released in a landscape dominated by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
Battle Royale quickly darkened save the world, and its incredible enduring popularity has made it the game to beat for the next decade. “I think it’s reached that level of cultural stickiness,” says Franklin. “It’s the Epic Games Store version in a lot of ways Counterstrike: GO. This original big thing that will be enduringly popular on this platform.” CS:GO was was released a decade ago and still regularly has around 600,000 concurrent players on Steam.
The exact mechanics that make up the Fortnite: Battle Royale of 2032 are less clear. While the game was once defined by its inclusion of buildings, it borrows save the world, Epic recently released a no-build mode. Some as above Fourteen days Streamer SypherPK, think This mode is growing in popularity due to its lower barrier to entry. He argues that this could also have an impact on competition Fourteen days, which revolves around build-based strategies. For this reason eSport at the highest level Fourteen days is becoming increasingly opaque to viewers, especially newer ones, who play without even building. Because of this, SypherPK predicts less interest in esports, both in terms of viewership and players interested in getting competitive.
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And regardless of what battle royale mode looks like 10 years from now, it’s going to continue to be overshadowed Fourteen days‘s other uses. Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Worlds, which has been developing virtual worlds since 1993, anticipates the battle royale genre as a whole Fortnite: Battle Royale specifically for “losing popularity over time.” He predicts this will allow these other modes – and possibly new ones not yet considered – to take over.
Currently, the other important aspect of Fourteen days is Creative, a sandbox that invites players to create their own games. Köster sees this as a slower option that’s growing Fourteen days‘s longevity by preventing players from burning out and turning elsewhere. “That [battle royale] play and social space [of Creative] reinforce each other – if you get tired of one, you can jump to the other and vice versa,” he says.
creative mode been called “the future of Fourteen days‘ by Aron Garst at Wired and, similar to streaming Battle Royale mode, has already launched careers of its own. Haley Urbanus is one of those professionals who learned her design skills solely by experimenting inside Fourteen days. The studio she works with, Atlas Creative, has partnered with brands like Alienware and Target to create custom maps for them. “I think players will grow out of battle royale and into creative,” she says.
Many creative maps have been played millions of times, including one of Urbanus’ own Underwater hide and seek which has been played 45 million times. At the time of our conversation, Epic had announced that Creative would be getting a “2.0” overhaul, although details weren’t yet available. But Urbanus thinks it’s possible in the future Fourteen days Players are getting something close to Epic’s Unreal Engine as a tool for everyone.
Another big change she predicts is how these games reach other players. “Right now we have this discovery [system] that is based on algorithms,” says Urbanus. “I would say maybe in the next five years [there could be] something similar to the Epic Games Store, but for content creators.” She also mentioned the model currently used by other user-generated content games, such as Robloxwhere creators could sell assets and games, with a fee from each sale going to Epic.
“And then they’re going to have another side of it where there’s going to be other people building in the metaverse and going to build their own open worlds,” says Urbanus. The idea of the metaverse always seems to lurk in the background when the future of Fourteen days is called. A blog entry von Koster explains that a metaverse goes further than an online world like an MMO or a multiverse Roblox – or Fourteen dayscurrent creative mode of . In short, a metaverse integrates itself into the real world. As Fourteen days could approach, that’s not entirely clear yet, but it’s on the table.
“[Epic Games CEO] Tim Sweeney has said quite clearly that he sees it Fourteen days direction,” says Köster. In April, Sweeney called Fourteen days “an emerging Metaverse platform.” (Epic did not respond in a timely manner to a request for comment on its ambitions for the game’s next decade.) Koster says the popularity of Fourteen days and its ownership of the Unreal Engine are assets Epic can leverage in this endeavor. But he believes it still has a long way to go “in terms of things like social complexity, freedom of action and so on.”
And whether its current popularity would make its Metaverse form popular is another question. “There’s just no user interest [in the metaverse], really,” says Franklin. “Fourteen days is popular because it is a popular video game to stream and play with friends.”
It is also popular because it has been constantly evolving since the beginning Battle Royale started just a few weeks later save the world. This growth into new modes will continue. “The concerts and events will very likely soon become their own fully-fledged mode,” says Köster. Franklin also envisions a spin-off mode called Experiences. “You can come here and see someone’s childhood home, walk through a museum in Rome and then fly to the moon and relive the Apollo 11 landing.”
So what could Fourteen days what will look like in 2032? Probably the way it looks now, but with more of everything. According to Franklin and Urbanus, the core ideas of Battle Royale and creative mode are likely to persist even if the details change. but Fourteen days itself will expand. “It’s going to be a bit more like a carnival, with each of these other modes having a ‘ride’ along the way,” says Köster. “After all, there’s a reason we call so many online worlds ‘theme parks’.”
