Anyone who owns a mobile device understands the panic when they see the ‘No Signal’ message appear or, when they go to Instagram, and it says the site is offline. What are you supposed to do then?
But perhaps it is worse for gamers when their chosen games go offline. Imagine you are building a world in Fortnite. You know what to do next, but you can’t get onto the game. Sometimes creativity only lasts so long before we forget what we intended to do.
Funnily enough, a similar story did happen to Fortnite players earlier in April when they were not able to access the online video game for several hours.
The Day Fortnite Went Dark
Fortnite is an online video game by Epic Games that belongs to the survival, battle royale, and sandbox genre. Since its release in 2017, the game has become especially popular amongst the younger gaming generation. As calculated and recorded by Statista, in its Battle Royale mode, 62.7% of players are between 18 and 24 years old.
On April 13, 2021, the Fornite server went down for several hours so that updates could occur. The server shut down at 7 am and it affected Switch and Mobile platforms, as well as Xbox, PC, and PS4. There was another shut down on April 27, 2021. Even though the outage had good intentions — it was to add new content to keep the game exciting — it did bring up the question of how essential reliable services are in today’s online gaming world.
Why Do We Need Reliable Services?
If a service is deemed unreliable, it can yield a bad user experience. In business, Indeed says customer satisfaction is important, and it should be a focal point for businesses since customers drive businesses forward. A reliable service performs the function that it is supposed to, even if things go wrong. In the online gaming world, users expect to play their game to a degree, even if the service is updating. The fact that Fortnite is updating every few weeks means gamers are not performing the functions they expected on the basis they expected when they signed up to play.
Which Industries Address This Problem Well?
The online casino industry addresses the need for reliability in the online gaming industry particularly well. There are online review sites like SuperLenny, which gather reliable information about different online casinos so players can make informed decisions. For instance, since there are so many casino bonuses offered, SuperLenny rates them on things like low deposit requirements and wagering requirements of less than 35x. Many online casinos have also started to adopt 5G technology. By implementing this technology, gamers don’t experience buffering or long lag times. These are two aspects that indicate an unreliable service.
Reliability in the online gaming industry is just as important as improved imagery and game design. But the recent Fortnite outages show that there are still games out there that have yet to realize the importance.
