Last year, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds arrived to major fanfare and player support. So much so that to this day, it’s sold 26 million copies, and is home to over 30 million players (people have gotten banned, that explains the gap). And for a while, it seemed no one could touch this juggernaut. Then, along came Fortnite, a long-gestating title from Epic Games. It didn’t start out as a direct competitor, but then, it added a free “Battle Royale” Mode, and the competition took off from there.
PUBG had the time advantage, but Fortnite had the reach. For unlike PUBG, Fortnite launched on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. PUBG was only on Steam until last December when it launched on the Xbox One Preview program. That difference has proven to be huge, as Fortnite soon made up a lot of ground, and now, Epic Games revealed in a blog post that the game has reached 3.4 million concurrent players. That’s more than PUBG.
Fortnite hit a new peak of 3.4 million concurrent players last Sunday… and that didn’t come without issues! This blog post aims to share technical details about the challenges of rapidly scaling a game and its online services far beyond our wildest growth expectations.
Now, as you can read in the post, the team did NOT expect this big of a turnout. What’s more, they’ve jumped quite a bit since the last report of their concurrent player base was around 2 million. That shows that the game is advancing at quite a pace. What’s more, while their sales may not be at PUBG’s level, they are retaining them at a much better rate when you think about it.
The popularity for Fortnite is likely tied to Epic Games’ desire to make it standout, which has included bringing in new modes for limited time periods as well as new weapons to play with.