Paragon Updates Slowing Down, And It's Due To FNBR's Success

By Jason Winter, News Editor Posted: January 17, 2018

When is two weeks (a fortnight) greater than (every) three weeks? When discussing Epic Games' products, apparently.

In an open letter to fans on the Paragon subreddit, an Epic representative pulled relatively few punches in describing the MOBA as not "large enough to achieve mainstream success," which has led the developer "to question if we have a good path to grow Paragon and make it thrive." Work continues on the game, including an update this week, but progress has slowed down. One reason for that is an increased focus on long-term goals, which aren't as typically visible as the short-term ones.

The other reason? Well...

"a number of Paragon team members jumped onto Fortnite to help sustain the game as it has grown far larger than anything in Epic’s past."

That's quite the understatement, with Fortnite Battle Royale boasting over 40 million registered players. It's the admission no fan of a game wants to hear from its developer when that dev creates a new, more successful, game. It's also one that's invariably true, no matter how much a dev says that the older game hasn't been abandoned and is still receiving full support or some other half-truth meant to placate players and not get them to quit a "dying" game.

Got a news tip? Contact us directly here!

In this article: Fortnite, Epic Games, Paragon.

About the Author

Jason Winter, News Editor
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.

hackisack 5 years ago

I guess Paragon wasted all of its potential in early Alpha/Beta, when it was incredibly (!) slow and more boring than watching a match of curling! I never came back and so did no one of my online friends. But to be fair, same happened with Paladins and Orsc Must Die Unchained (the latter closed down also). Paladins seems to have a solid playerbase for whatever reason.
Still, Epic is terrible at managing their development: Not only Paragon, but most of all Unreal Tournament (4) suffers from severe lack of development, even Fortnite PvE.
Maybe they'll come back when Fortnite Royale brings in enough cash to cross-finance other projects.

Mizogin 5 years ago

Lol, someone plays Paragon? Also the wirter of the article is pretty bad at understanding the comany's resource management. It's obvious even to child that Epic did right by concentrating it's working power on Fortnite which is about 100 times more successful than Paragon

Edge Damodred 5 years ago

Additionally Paragon did itself no favors by basically redesigning itself every 6-10 months chasing away a significant portion of its user base who got tired of having to essentially relearn the game from almost the ground up. It's hard to recommend a game to your friends when you yourself are not sure it's going to be essentially the same game down the road.

Correcting design issues is of course needed but ripping out entire systems all at once and doing it with a relatively high frequency just sets off alarms. The excuse that it's "in beta" no longer flies anymore given the evolutionary nature of live games.