It was only by the mid-2010s that millions of consumer-grade devices could manage a game like Fortnite—one with dozens of richly animated avatars in a single match, each one capable of a wide range of actions, and interacting in a vivid and tangible world, rather than the cold vastness of space. It was around this same time that enough affordable servers were available that could manage and synchronize the inputs coming from so many devices.
