With the Battle Royale genre of multiplayer games showing no signs of slowing down, we thought we’d go back to the King of BR: Fortnite! Epic Games’ hit free-to-play is such a part of the everyday gaming culture now that it can’t be ignored. How much do you know about it?
1. Fortnite is the first free multiplayer title that has pushed for everyone, on all platforms, to enjoy it. Epic Games has stated repeatedly that their ultimate goal is to get gamers on all platforms playing with one another with no system restrictions.
2. Ninja, the most well-known of Fortnite: Battle Royale players, teamed up with the musician Drake to take on the game which resulted in the most talked about moment in the game’s history. Drake then told people that, after spending over 20 hours a week in the studio to record his music, Fortnite had become a welcome reprieve and he only wanted to play online with the best. Ninja definitely wasn’t going to pass that up.
3. Within 2 weeks of Fortnite: Battle Royale releasing, Epic Games saw over 10 million unique users accessing the new game mode. That’s INSANE for a free to play title.
4. Epic Games had released Paragon in a very long Early Access phase while testing Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode. Paragon, which had the once-booming MOBA mechanic, soon saw its development team whittled down as they were being brought to the Fortnite team to continue work on its release. Because of this, quite a few games would get shelved while Epic finessed a game that they were sure had worldwide potential. We miss Paragon but Epic wasn’t wrong.
5. As of March of this year, there are over 250 million Fortnite players around the world and it hasn’t seen any sign of slowing down.
6. Netflix has claimed that Epic Games has become more of a threat to their viewership than even HBO has during Game of Thrones airings.
7. Epic Games brought in the musician Marshmello to do a live event within the game world and nearly 11 million people logged in to make sure they could be there for the wild in-game concert.
8. Fortnite brought in over 2.8 million dollars in 2018 with its Battle Royale mode that subsequently saw a massive decrease in attention to its base game.
