It’s easy to forget that Fortnite — a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players — began as a failure. It was conceived as a player vs. environment game that Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney described as a cross between Minecraft and Left 4 Dead in 2015, before co-opting the last-man-standing mechanics of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and becoming the biggest game on the planet. Fortnite stole that idea and then perfected the formula by making it less technical and more accessible; it won the fight for battle royale’s soul by being bigger, wackier, and just more fun than PUBG’s sterile, militaristic experience. Fortnite became the better game by leaning into goofiness.
The game’s real achievement is subtler,...