It's easy to forget that we've only been playing games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite and Apex Legends for a couple of years -- some only a few months. The hundred-player battle royale genre, while massive, is still new to competitive play, and each new entry has added its own special flavor to the mix.
No one knows that better than the recruitment teams at esports organizations like Team Liquid, Cloud 9 and Gen.G. Apex Legends, Respawn's expansion on the Titanfall series, was released Feb. 4, and teams had already recruited players by early March.
How do organizations decide to recruit players for games that are so new, some of which have had no tournaments or competitive play? Ken Serra, the head of community and engagement for Team Liquid, said the decision is about more than esports.
"Measuring success is rarely binary," Serra said. "If our player falls short in a lot of tournaments, we ask a few questions: Did they improve the team? Did their placement improve over time? Did they build a community? Do they stream? Do they attract sponsors? We ask a lot of questions like this when recruiting players."
The very nature of the battle royale genre has shifted how teams look at recruitment, meaning that success can also involve adding to a team's brand. That can mean a few things to different organizations, but it mostly comes down to what game developers like Epic Games, Respawn and Treyarch have planned for their battle royales.
"The battle royale games have been pretty unique for us. You have 100 players, 60 for Apex, drop into a zone and kill each other," Serra said. "You're only going to get a handful of winners in a given tournament or circuit. If several top teams sign all the top players who get the best tournament placings, is there anything left? Would a team get anything from signing someone who may not have the top placements?"
With the ubiquity of the battle royale genre and games like Fortnite still getting hundreds of thousands of viewers on Twitch, the answer is a clear yes. No matter how you look at it, streaming has become king, and the most dominant games on Twitch are battle royales.
The nature of those streams, however, varies based on the game.
Epic Games has pushed a friendly, almost casual competitiveness in Fortnite, meaning players that come to their invitationals are big personalities rather than the most intense competitors. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, on the other hand, has fostered a diehard competitive community with esport-centric tournaments held around the world. Only the best players and teams make it out.
"If you want to go pro in Fortnite, you have to build a brand. Epic put the focus on being an influencer and having a following," said Cloud9's Apex team manager, Krissi Waters. "PUBG, and Apex Legends for that matter, are more about the competition, so you have to be a strong player and have a good brand."
Outside being skilled at a specific game, one of the biggest things that aspiring pro players absolutely need to do is stream. It's one of the best ways to get your name out there and possibly the best way to get noticed by top teams.
"If you're good enough, people will want to watch you and hype you up," Waters said. "It's more than building a brand too, since everyone has their personality on display when they stream. You can get a taste of who they are. Teams use that to gauge how well a person might work in their organization."
Teams have always recruited based off more than mechanical skill, but other distinctions have become more important recently. Teams want good communication, teamwork, and community involvement. Sometimes, that distinction can be more important than raw talent.
"Skills are always workable in battle royales," Waters said. "I would rather take someone who's good in the community but who may not have the best placements or sharpest mechanics."
Players still need to have top-tier mechanical skill to get recruited for Fortnite or Apex Legends. It's just much harder to gauge that with battle royales because most of these recent games don't have reliable leaderboards or metrics. To remedy that, orgs like Team Liquid and Gen.G look at performances in other games. That's why fans have seen plenty of talent from Overwatch, Call of Duty and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive make the jump to Fortnite.
"There is no in-game ladder or ranked mode," Gen.G general manager Nathan Stanz said. "Games like League or Overwatch have a very strict ranking, even when it's handled by third-party aggregators. Neither of those exist in a lot of battle royales. Everyone is queuing randomly, so you don't necessarily have the best data to look at."
Luckily, aiming, shotcalling and other skills in games like Counter-Strike transfer to battle royales easily because the fundamentals are largely the same. Team Liquid's trio for Apex Legends came from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Blackout mode, and Gen.G's squad came from Overwatch. The primary difference is experience with the intricacies of each game. Fortnite is versatile with solo, duo and four-person squad modes, while Apex Legends focuses on squads of three.
"Apex Legends is pretty unique when compared with other battle royales: Its only game mode has three-man squads," Waters said. "Finding players with adequate individual skill who have that type of experience and can work as a team is important. We look to other games to see how they stack up, so naturally a Fortnite solos player may not be the right fit."
These teams have done more than hunt down talent; they've created space where talent can grow. Gen.G and Team Liquid established their own community discord servers for Fortnite and Apex Legends with thousands of members where they host scrimmages. They've tried to fill in the gaps where Epic Games and Respawn fall short, giving players who want to focus on competition an outlet to practice and improve.
While the chances are low, one of the players that gets recruited could be the next Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek or the next Tyler "Ninja" Blevins after blowing up overnight.
"If you're on the low end of the totem pole, it's sort of similar to Panda Global in the [fighting game community] scene," Serra said. "They were quite small a few years ago, but they picked up players and stuck to their guns. Now, they've created a name for themselves. That's kind of the expectation we have for battle royales."