Fortnite’s Success Leads To $12 Million Worth Of Paragon Assets Becoming Free

At this point, it’s clear that Fornite Battle Royale is a runaway success, with the 100-player game surpassing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in terms of the total number of players and number of concurrent players. An unfortunate casualty of Fortnite’s success is the multiplayer Arena Shooter, Paragon. Turning a negative into a positive, however, Epic Games decided to make the game’s asset available for all developers to use.

As Gamespot notes, Epic Games also owns the Unreal Engine that is used to power many of today’s video games. Being a popular engine makes it a mainstay within the developer community. Now, the studio is giving away the assets of Paragon for these developers to use as they see fit, which is actually worth $12 million in total.

The giveaways don’t stop there either. Epic plans to release even more assets that can create even more characters for a MOBA game in the near future. This basically means that developers can feel free to create their own games using the Paragon assets that are now available, which could lead to a worthy rival to Blizzard’s Overwatch.

As many publications have already remarked, this is an unusual choice on the part of a studio. Video game assets are normally closely guarded secrets because they represent a company’s ability to create titles that are worth money. Giving them away like that, even if they are for a game that is already unplugged is still a massive departure from normal proceedings.

In any case, it’s good that Epic isn’t simply throwing everything it worked hard for in developing Paragon in the dumpster. In the hands of the right developer, perhaps a title that becomes a worthy successor to the MOBA that brings out the full potential of the assets might come along, Kotaku notes. By making the assets free, Epic just made this a lot more likely.