The Psychology Of Fortnite’s Battle Pass

Fortnite, published by Epic Games, can be a bit confusing to outside observers. Partially because it features giant banana people slapping together rickety, wooden towers and sniping opponents from three time zones away and then dancing about it. But also because for a free game Fortnite makes an awful lot of money. According to one analysis by Techcrunch, Epic Games made $3 billion in profit by the end of 2018 and much of that is attributed to this free-to-play behemoth. How?

The answer is, of course, the game’s Battle Pass. Instead of selling the whole game or relying on oft-despised mechanics like loot boxes, Fortnite lets players purchase a limited time Battle Pass for about $10 or your local equivalent. As they play matches –win or lose– these players level up their Battle Pass and thus earn progress towards unlocking various rewards. These prizes include skins, avatars, visual effects, and other cosmetics that have no impact on gameplay but make players look cool. Leveling up a pass takes between 75 and 150 hours. Or you can give Epic some more money and unlock great chunks of the rewards at once.

Given how lucrative the Battle Pass is, it may not surprise you to hear that there’s some subtle and effective tricks of psychology behind how it’s structured and how it’s presented. Let’s review just three of them.

The Principle of Progress

In their 2011 book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer had hundreds of from different companies complete over 12,000 daily diaries about how their workdays were going. The short version of their results is that employees were the most excited about and engaged with their work on days when they felt that they were making some progress –any progress– towards meaningful work. Those were the days when they were most motivated to keep plugging away.

This is in line with decades of other research on goal setting and motivation showing that simply feeling that you’re making measurable progress towards a distant goal motivates people to persist and keep trying. If you never get specific feedback about your progress, you’re likely to stall out or adopt another goal.

Like many video games, Fortnite has been engineered to give specific, useful, and motivating feedback about progress towards goals. You can see exactly how close you…