Do these numbers tell us something about the attention span of Fortnite players?
A Redditor conducted a little experiment in Fortnite Festival... and the numbers don't make the community look too great.
A Fortnite Festival Experiment
In a post on the official Fortnite Festival subreddit, u/hellaparadoxial9614 recently posted an experiment that they had conducted:
They had joined 100 rounds of Fortnite Festival between January 14 and March 31, with the "Fill" function activated – this means they were put into lobbies filled with random players. In these 100 games, they wrote down the following data:
- Amount of players in a game upon load-in
- Songs chosen in a game
- Number of people leaving before the first song begins
- Number of people remaining after the first song ends
- Number of people remaining after the second song ends
- Number of people remaining after the third song ends
- Number of people remaining after the fourth song ends
- The difficulty of each player in a game (if a player changed difficulty after the first song started, then this was used instead of the original difficulty) and whether they left the game early
- Number of flawless plays in a game
- Instruments chosen for each song in a game
As you can see, the main data was focused on how many people leave early during a round – and let's just say the results are underwhelming.
How Many People Leave Early?
The numbers of those who left before the actual end of the round are as follows:
u/hellaparadoxial9614 encountered 297 players overall, out of which:
- 86 played on Easy, out of which 56 left early > That's 65.1%
- 86 played on Medium, out of which 43 left early > That's 50%
- 45 played on Hard, out of which 22 left early > That's 48.9%
- 79 players on Expert, out of which 32 left early > That's 40.5%
What can we conclude from this? The better players are less likely to leave early. But even on higher difficulties, almost half of the players apparently can't sit through 4 songs in a row, even though this typically doesn't take longer than a full round in other Fortnite modes.
Without being split into different difficulties, this is what the numbers look like. Out of the 297 players:
- 35 (11.8%) left before the first song even started, which makes you wonder why they even bothered to join a round in the first place, especially one filled with other players
- 45 (15.2%) left during the first song
- 40 (13.5%) left during or immediately before the second song
- 35 (11.8%) left during or immediately before the third song
- 58 (19.5%) left during or immediately before the fourth song
- A disappointing 82 players (27.6%) stayed for the full game
If you're wondering why so many players left during the fourth song specifically, it's because many didn't have a choice but to leave – because out of the 100 rounds played by u/hellaparadoxial9614, only 50 had a full setlist of 4 songs.
39 games only had 3 songs in their setlists, 10 games had 2 songs, and 1 game only had one song (chosen by u/hellaparadoxial9614). In these games, players either left before the round started (cancelling out their song choice), left without even trying to choose a song, or pressed "ready" without choosing a song.
In other words, 72,4% of players couldn't be bothered to play a full setlist. And yes, we do know that sometimes, problems other than not wanting to finish a round can interrupt your game – other people, internet issues, etc. However, this shouldn't happen in almost three-quarters of all cases.
After all, the game does offer you the opportunity to join a lobby alone, choose up to 4 songs by yourself, and decide when the next song starts without a countdown (there's only no countdown if you're alone).
So anyone who knows that they won't be able to stay for a full round or who plans on leaving at the first inconvenience could technically do this instead of leaving the rest of their group hanging.
Is There Still Hope For Fortnite Festival?
The Fortnite Festival community has already been complaining about the mode failing for a while, with posts such as:
"Festival is dying. The corporate board at Epic needs to stop suffocating this game" - u/ComfortablePatience
"Why did Festival fall off so hard?/ How can they bring players back?" - u/JimmyCartersBacon
Well, for a game mode to be successful, it needs active players. And players won't be enthusiastic about joining a round with strangers if they know that the majority will leave early anyway – many players in the subreddit state that they don't use the "Fill" option at all anymore when playing this mode.
So one step towards saving this mode would probably be that more than a quarter of players stay until the end of the round.
If you want to read up on the other statistics collected by u/hellaparadoxial9614, you can do so with the link provided above. And if you want to know how to get better at Fortnite Festival, check out this article.
What do you think about these numbers? Is it understandable that so many players leave early?