Paragon Faces Uncertain Future Following Fortnite's Success

In a frank post on the Paragon subreddit this week Epic Games laid out how things stand for their 3D MOBA Paragon. The main issue facing the game is that despite continued updates, it has failed to attract a large enough audience to make the project viable. While this has been the case for months now, the breakout success of Epic's Battle Royale title Fortnite has made the issue more urgent.

Staff and resources have been redirected from Paragon to Fortnite just to keep up with its explosive growth. The game has reached 40 million players with a peak concurrent playerbase over 2 million since the introduction of a Battle Royale mode in September 2017. While some in the Paragon community have interpreted this state of affairs as a betrayal, its worth noting that Epic Games has never dealt with a game of such scale as Fortnite. Its understandable that, at least temporarily, the studio would muster all its available resources to ensure that Fornite survives its growing pains.

Beyond a necessary diversion of resources, the Paragon team noted a persistent issue with player retention:

The core challenge is that, of new players who try Paragon, only a small number continue to play regularly after a month. Though Paragon has evolved, no iteration has yet achieved that magical combination of ingredients that make for a sustainable game.

The post noted that updates will continue for now, but at a slower pace. V.45 is still set to release this week, with both Hero and Card balance changes. Stability improvements are also coming with the new version.

Epic Games ends with a request to the community to share their thoughts on what should be done with Paragon. The post has already receive over 1300 comments with most contributors offering encouragement. Many posts offer lengthy feedback and suggestions which should keep the folks at Epic busy for days to come.

Further Reading: An Open Discussion On Where We're At