So, GLITCH productions is crossing over with Epic Games by having Pomni and Jax appear in Fortnite. Now, of course there are issues with this, largely Epic Games is a terrible company that is trying to replace a bunch of its human employees with AI slop and apparently fired an employee with Brain Cancer thus stripping away his life insurance, yeah Epic Games is not a good company... name me a company that is, and yeah I am disappointed that GLITCH would choose to work and collab with them, but I'm gonna be honest that's not the biggest source of my disdain with this announcement. Like, yeah they should be more incriminating with who they work with, but to play Devil's Advocate, it's Fortnite. Like, Fortnite is one of the biggest games in the world right now, the fact that GLITCH characters are appearing in Fortnite before anything like Minecraft, some Tetris clone, or even as a deck of cards, like that says something about Fortnite and by extension Epic Games. Yeah, I don't like Epic Games as a company, and frankly I don't care about Fortnite as a game, but I hold no ill-will towards GLITCH for this decision, you can all you want, but money's got to be made somehow, and maybe this is the first step to an actual video game, like a Murder Drones video game would kick ass. No, my disdain for this news comes mostly from the fact that... well, it's Fortnite, and I despise what Fortnite is doing to and with Pop-Culture.
I was talking about this with a friend of mine and it helped me really gather my thoughts on the matter, because the problem was more than just "Popular = Bad", I am a strong proponent that popularity is a good thing overall, like Pokémon has done nothing but benefit by being the most popular video game franchise in the world, and Minecraft ain't slowing down any either, so why does the Fortnite collab irritate me so much? Fortnite's current model seems to be... like the worst, most annoying autistic kid (Self burn, those are rare), like you know that kid who finds a new thing and makes it their entire personality, or if you were like me you probably were that kid, Fortnite kinda comes off like that.
Its business model seems to be less "Hey let's make a great game that everyone will want to play" and more "Let's load our game with licenses and have people come back for a skin-economy." Like I don't agree with what Yahtzee Croshaw said about Mortal Kombat 1, but like that does kind of apply to Fortnite, but Mortal Kombat's case they have characters that make sense for Mortal Kombat, they have violent action characters like Omni-Man, Robocop, Jason Voorhees, they don't have Peter Griffin and Pomni. On top of that Mortal Kombat has actual... y'know, characters, like you can name them and identify them, Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, Shao Kahn, Sub-Zero, Kenshi, you know most of these characters if you know anything about Mortal Kombat, Fortnite is not the same. I'm sure they have named original characters, but for the life of me I can't think of any of them, I don't know their names, I've never really seen much art of any of them out in the wild.
Yes, other games do this kind of thing as well, but most of them are not as egregious about it as Fortnite. Super Smash Bros is a game that works because the novelty of having Mario, Link and Pikachu fighting each other is backed by what is ultimately a solid platform-brawler, the kind of which has become so linked to Smash Bros that very few fighting games try the same thing, while Fortnite is just one in a sea of Battle Royale shooter games. Also, Nintendo can get away with it because most of the characters are Nintendo characters. I made this comment years ago about PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, but that game was never going to be as great as Smash Bros solely because Sony does not have that many first-party characters that are as iconic to their brand as their second and third party characters. Nintendo has so many iconic first and second party characters that a fighting game with just them would sell like hotcakes, and like PlayStation All-Stars, Fortnite is struggling in the original character department.
It's an attention grab more than anything else, they're saying "Look, we have The Simpsons, we have Cartoon Network licenses, we have The Amazing Digital Circus" they're doing this because they know it will make people play their game and spend money on cosmetics, it's a cycle; They add some license to their game, streamers play with the license and skins, rinse and repeat. Really the streamers only get the views because "Look at this guy, they're playing Fortnite as Danny Phantom" or "They're playing with the Peter Griffin skin", it's like a gelatinous cube in Dungeons and Dragons, catching I.P.'s and licenses and absorbing them while dissolving them of any actual value. Like there was buzz about ConcernedApe thinking about collabing with Fortnite, and I'm just thinking, "Yeah, Stardew Valley, the game about the connection with nature and community where the community has a strong opinion of players who choose the corporate route. That would be perfect for the license gobbling gelatinous cube."
I think the big problem I have with this is, and this is shockingly an actual problem, Fortnite is not ignorable. Like Marvel Rivals, that game came out, it's pretty popular, people still play it, it gave us the popular iteration of Squirrel Girl that... look I like fine but I want the dork that juggled Kraven with one hand that I fell in love with as a teenager. Still it's a Marvel Hero Shooter, I don't have to play it, I don't have to pay attention to it. Like, the only thing I know of Marvel Rivals beyond the game is that one of the voice actors was somewhat involved in a controversy involving his daughter that later expanded to involve BlackGyrph0n, Saberspark and a bunch of other crazy people. That's it, I can't even name all the voice actors in that game, I love it. I don't have to know anything about Marvel Rivals. The same cannot be said for Fortnite, I see ads for it everywhere, they had some kind of Halo collab and got Rooster Teeth to do something, they had YouTube ads for their Simpsons thing, the news that The Amazing Digital Circus was coming was shared by Toonhive, I cannot ignore Fortnite.
Fortnite constantly shoves itself in people's faces with these licenses, it's not even creating its own pop culture at this point, it's leeching off of the success and popularity of other properties, like Smash Bros is has still given us original memes, locations, stories, characters. The Master Hand, Final Destination, Subspace Emissary, Fox Only No Items, Smash Bros isn't just leeching off of pop-culture, one can argue that has created its own parts of Pop-Culture. Fortnite is reminding me a lot of Garry's Mod, where half of the fun of the game is just the flagrant usage of characters they didn't create, but like... Garry's Mod is a joke, it's a sandbox game where you can make Gordon Freeman and and Sonic ride a Minecraft Boat over a river in a Spyro world. Fortnite is Battle Royale Garry's Mod without the joke. It does not create Pop Culture, and it barely qualifies as celebrating it. Again, what are the names of the original characters? What is the name of the original location? Unless you are an avid player you probably don't know, nobody is making videos about how Fortnite Island is an underrated location like Nintendo's Wuhu Island. Fortnite really is on the same level as Garry's Mod in the Pop-Culture pantheon, except Gmod was partly used for things like SMG4 so even Gmod can arguably claim to have created its own piece of pop-culture.
Look, I don't care is GLITCH wants to collab with Fortnite, again that money's gotta me made somehow, it's the same reason I have no ill-will towards the actors in the new Harry Potter series, like yeah they probably should have reconsidered, but then again it's one the most popular franchises in modern history so those actors, especially those child actors, are basically set for life. GLITCH can collab with Fortnite, they can collab with Konami for all I care, but let's be real the collab can only happen because Fortnite is a license leech, and it only looked at The Amazing Digital Circus because it is so freaking popular that it licked it's gluttonous lips and salivated at the idea. If the Circus was so popular, we wouldn't be talking about this and instead be talking about Fortnite collabing with Bear in the Big Blue House, that would actually be funny.