Giving away the season 8 battle pass means that players are A) more engaged with the game as they try to unlock stuff for free, and more engaged players may be tempted to buy things from the store, and players with a battle pass may end up buying tier boosts to make sure they get to tier 100 if they can’t grind it out manually.
I do have to wonder what the revenue picture will be like in the launch month of Apex Legends, however, the biggest compe****or Fortnite has faced since it overtook PUBG, and one that has been aggressively monetized by EA with a store, loot boxes, character unlocks and now an upcoming Fortnite-like battle pass next month. I think it’s too early to know if Apex will be a long term threat to Fortnite, and I’m already seeing a lot of creators shift back to the latter, but we’ll have to see.
The thing is, Fortnite is so huge its 2019 revenue could be a third of what it was in 2018 and that would still be…a billion dollars. We have a long, long way to go before we start seriously talking about “the fall of Fortnite” given how successful it’s been and continues to be, even with declines novel Herokiller, available now