You’d imagine a streaming service like Netflix would be worried about rival streaming services like HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Not so. As it turns out, Netflix is most worried about… Fortnite.
Yep, it transpires that the competition the streaming giant dreads more than any other is from Epic’s uber popular free to play battle royale, which just proves that Fortnite is getting stronger every day.
Netflix wrote in a recent letter to shareholders:
We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO. When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in Oct, our viewing and signups spiked for that time…There are thousands of competitors in this highly-fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those with great experiences.
It seems that Netflix’s main concern regarding Fortnite is that the battle royale is taking up a hell of a lot of screen time for younger audiences – time I imagine Netflix would rather people spent watching The Good Place, or Daredevil.
Except of course Daredevil has been cancelled in what can only be described as one of the greatest tragedies of the modern age. I mean, did you see season three? It was incredible. I realise I’m getting off track, it just… it still hurts.
Anyway, while kids can of course still have a subscription to Netflix and spend all their time on Fortnite, I imagine the streaming service is concerned that eventually people will realise they just having been using it enough to justify paying that monthly fee.
This would, presumably, lead folk to cancel their Netflix subscriptions so they have a little extra money to buy new skins (or whatever) for the battle royale.
There’s also a scarily good chance that by the year 2030, the only thing people actually stream in between games of Fortnite will be videos of Fortnite on YouTube, rendering Netflix, HBO, Et Al. completely useless.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.