I have a confession: when I first heard that Walker Labs and Readyverse Studios were pitching Open as a “multi-biome, multi-IP, multi-mode battle royale experience,” my inner teenager sat up like a dog hearing the cheese drawer. Then my adult brain—the one that has spent roughly nine years dropping into Fortnite—looked around and said, buddy, you already live here. 🎮

To be fair, Open is not a horrible idea. A Ready Player One battle royale sounds like a license to print nostalgia money. The problem is that a Ready Player One battle royale already exists, and it has been one of the most popular games in the world for years. It is called Fortnite, and it has spent the last several years turning itself into a crossover event so dense that a typical match now feels like a comic-con got trapped inside a storm circle.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about Ready Player One: the IP itself has never been the most valuable part. It is the paper bag around a really expensive bottle of whiskey—or, more accurately, the paper bag around dozens of really expensive bottles clinking together while Epic carries them to the checkout. Ernest Cline’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s movie are loaded with borrowed toys. The book has Wade Watts gunning in WarGames; the movie has him gunning in The Shining just in time for the elevator to unleash a tsunami of blood. He plays a perfect game of Pac-Man in the book and battles alongside Tracer and the Iron Giant in the film. The whole thing is a theme park built entirely out of other people’s souvenir shops.

And look, I get the appeal. The book came out when I was in high school, so I had a soft spot for its IP-stuffed world for a while. But even by the time the movie arrived in 2018, Ready Player One’s fantasy was getting closer to reality. The film hit theaters early in Fortnite’s reign, before the game was fully inundated with branded crossovers. By 2026, the difference between a typical Fortnite match and Ready Player One’s climactic battle is mostly presentation. Spielberg and ILM can cook up something better looking than me twiddling the right stick, but the content is the same: a bunch of familiar faces from different franchises crashing into each other while the sky does something dramatic.

I won’t say nobody cares about Wade Watts. If paying attention to fandom has taught me anything, it is that there is always someone out there who cares very deeply about something most people don’t. Somewhere, a person has a Wade Watts Funko Pop in a glass case and a strong opinion about the book’s ending. I respect that. But most people were more invested in the idea of Ready Player One—a virtual reality world where the most dedicated users dig up nostalgic bits of 1980s pop culture—than they ever were in the characters. I liked that stuff when I first read the book, but I was most interested in the non-Oasis material, specifically Wade’s home in the Stacks. That vertical Oklahoma City village made by stacking mobile homes on top of each other like LEGOs felt like the one image with a pulse. The book and movie, however, are focused on the Oasis and its orgy of IP. That is the part everyone remembers.

But it is 2026. We have had Fortnite and PUBG for roughly nine years, plus branded crossovers in Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, and plenty of other big games. The crossover-industrial complex is no longer a novelty; it is the weather. The Ready Player One license is not enough to pull players away from those games. It may be pitched as a metaverse, but we already have plenty of those. Fortnite is a metaverse. Roblox is a metaverse. My phone’s home screen is basically a metaverse with worse battery life.

The pitch for Open	Where I have already played it
Multi-biome	Fortnite seasons rotate biomes like socks
Multi-IP	Fortnite has become a comic-con with a storm circle
Multi-mode	Fortnite has battle royale, creative, LEGO, racing, festival, and more

That does not automatically make Open a bad game. It might be good. It might have a compelling vision we have not seen yet. But the elevator pitch has already been greenlit, built, and stuffed with skins. Unless Walker Labs and Readyverse Studios have a genuinely fresh hook—something more than a paper bag full of borrowed whiskey bottles—we have played this game before. And I say that with the affection of someone who has already spent too many evenings yelling at a screen while a cartoon fish in a trench coat shoots at me. 🐟

So yes, I will keep an eye on Open. I am not rooting against it. I am just saying that the Ready Player One battle royale already exists, and its name is Fortnite. The only thing Open needs to prove is that it can be more than a nostalgia vending machine in a market that is already overflowing with nostalgia vending machines. That is a high bar. Or, to use the technical term: I have seen this movie, and I have also played the game, and I have also bought the skin.