Without a doubt, 2017 and 2018 will be remembered as the era of the battle royale game. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a worldwide phenomenon and apparently incapable of not producing mountains of cash, and even the folks at Rockstar will be (allegedly) giving the mode shot in the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2. The biggest competitor to PUBG dominance so far has been Fortnite: Battle Royale, a free-to-play addendum to Epic Games’ survival sandbox that was initially passed over in its original form. Whoever devised this pivot for Fortnite needs a promotion, because as of last Sunday, the title reached an unbelievable milestone in its fight for battle royale market share.
Last Sunday, Fortnite experienced a server outage, and Epic released an analysis of the situation today. It was not a simple malfunction, though—the servers crashed because concurrent players hit a frankly ridiculous 3.4 million.
The full outage report can be found here, but its primary function isn’t to recruit more software engineers. Epic are patting themselves on the back, and boy do they deserve it. PUBG, the industry’s 300-pound elephant in the room, broke the concurrent users record on Steam this past December—but that was only 3.1 million.
Fortnite can now boast its membership in the exclusive 3 million-plus club, though PUBG‘s numbers are likely higher. Fortnite sports cross-play between PS4 and PC, and their measure takes both of those bases into account. PUBG, on the other hand, only counted PC users. Combined with their wild success on consoles, the champ is still likely holding the belt.
Fortnite may not be the top of the battle royale class, but they’ve carved out an immense portion of the market and claimed a stake in one of the decade’s fastest-growing entertainment trends. Not even international esports like League of Legends or Overwatch can sport 3.4 million concurrent users, and being one of the most-played games of all time is more than enough of a reward.
Plus, we may be having the discussion about a Switch port sometime in the future.