In the past year an entirely new genre of video games have emerged and its taking the gaming industry by storm. A major shift in an industry that has reached a point of elite status, something that wouldn’t have been possible in years past.

The gaming industry has changed a lot in the past decade, for good and bad. A lot of the more recent change has been external with the rise of a secondary market in gaming.

This secondary market is made up of a vast amount of internet content being produced by gamers and being watched or consumed by other gamers. These are things like Twitch, Youtube, Mixer, and now many other growing streaming websites.

The gaming community is very connected, with apps like Discord, the avenues of connecting with each other has made the industry fluctuate in new ways.

We live in a new age of gaming. An age where Halo and Call of Duty are no longer our only choices for video games. In recent memory things were quite the opposite. Online play wasn’t quite as huge and basically the only games people could choose from were huge triple A titles that were made by five or six different companies.

Now we are seeing an influx of new content from smaller producers which is provided a massive variety of games in the industry. New blood creates stronger competition. It keeps long time producers in the industry on their toes and forces them to innovate new ideas instead of sticking to the mold.

The crown jewel of this changing industry in recent events has been the explosion of a new genre of video games called battle royal. At the forefront of this expansion in gaming has been Player Unknown Battlegrounds or PUBG.

PUBG released on PC in mid 2017 in early access which is what smaller developers tend to do to get the ball rolling on projects that are fairly large and the game just blew up. It became one of the most popular games out there and one of the ways it gained so much popularity is through this whole community of streamers and youtubers creating online content about this game.

In PUBG the player is thrusted onto an island on a plane carrying 99 other players. The player drops when they feel necessary and skydives to the huge 64 square Kilometer land mass below. The player must then scramble to find supplies such as weapons, armor, ammo and attachments, to fight all other players in the game. The only rule is the last man standing wins.

There is also a shrinking play area to force the players closer together and to eliminate each other. If caught outside of the play area, the player will find themselves to slowly die. So the player must adapt to fair number of obstacles to come out victorious. If the player is far away from the play area, they must mount a vehicle or run to travel a number of KM before they begin to die.

After seeing the wide success of PUBG the creators of Fortnite thought their game would be a good place to take on the genre that is growing exponentially in popularity. So they added a battle royale game mode to their sandbox game and since it has been a raging success. The battle royale part of the game is free to play but it also encourages microtransactions which has been quite lucrative.

These explosions of new genres of video games isn’t hugely new, but we haven’t yet seen an explosion of this magnitude in the industry before. It seems that these new structures of media forming around the gaming industry are accelerating an already rapidly growing industry which is overall a very positive thing for the consumer.

These explosions of new ideas are extremely good for gamers because games like Call of Duty, Halo and Assassin’s Creed are going to be forced to do new things or loose money. I only hope that this trend will continue and continue to rattle the cages of the big players of the industry.