the battle royalification of games is annoying for sure, but saying it started with fortnite is giving epic games wayyyy too much credit.
fortnite just ripped the entirety of PUBG but with cartoon graphics and worse shooting mechanics. and even PUBG was just taking the lead of minecraft hunger games which was popular YEARS before either PUBG or fortnite were around
except minecraft hunger games was good actually. it was fun and it was just a single game mode that some minecraft servers implemented, not the whole game. there are a ton of server minigames that creative minecraft community members come up with, hunger games just happened to capture everyone's attention the most, and then devs noticed and decided to capitalize with stuff like PUBG
Member when Fortnite had a single player mode? Actually it might still have one - I just brought it up because Fortnite went through a lot of iteration to get to the form it's in now, but frankly the PUBG devs were never in a position to do what Fornite eventually managed to do, since they didn't have the number of devs or the clarity of vision to turn their game into a lucrative live service that tapped into younger kids.
Anyway if Fortnite gets credit for anything, it's doing a Metaverse while monetizing it better than Facebook has managed to do with billions of dollars, lmao (of course the best Metaverse is still VRChat - I will never pay for a skin!)