Why do people play battle royales?

they're short, and the stakes are low. you don't have a 50/50 shot of winning - you're probably gonna lose, so you can go in with no expectations. it feels like there's less salt involved, it's just you and 99 other people screwing around.

well, either that, or you get to feel like a badass ganking all the plebs that think that way.

seriously though - the "only dying once" thing means that you never get dominated by any one opponent. you don't get your face stomped in by the same person over and over again. that I think is a pretty good thing, and it makes defeats less personal. that's a psychological barrier for some people staying in competitive online games, so getting rid of it draws in an audience that would otherwise move on from that kind of thing...that's at least one subset of the playerbase.