Evaluating only H1Z1 / Z1 Battle Royale’s profile at its peak — without knowing the outcome — the model ranked Competition as the #1 likely cause. That’s exactly how it died.
H1Z1 by Daybreak Game Company was one of the earliest battle royale games, releasing before PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite. At peak in 2016, the game had 150,000 concurrent Steam players. When PUBG launched in 2017 and Fortnite launched free-to-play in 2017, H1Z1 lost 90% of its player base within six months. Daybreak spun it out as Z1 Battle Royale in a final attempt to revive it in 2019, but the game was already a ghost town. The servers were finally shut down for console in 2020 and PC players dropped to hundreds. A technically capable game destroyed by superior free-to-play competition.
Lesson
“In gaming, being first in a genre provides no durable advantage if a well-funded competitor can execute the same genre mechanic with better production values and a free-to-play model. Player-hour attention markets are winner-take-most.”