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IS FORTNITE STILL POPULAR

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Chances are, that as a young person in 2018, you’ve heard of Fortnite. Fortnite is a beloved “Battle Royale” game that puts one hundred players on an island and challenges them to fight each other till the last one remains. Players must use their weaponry skills, their architectural instinct, as well as their wits when strategically defeating enemy squads.

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Fortnite is history's most popular video game, with an average of over 40 million monthly players. In January 2018, Fortnite set a staggering world record of over 3.4 million concurrent (at the same time) users. That world record is followed by 3.2 million concurrent players on another ‘Battle Royale’ game called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or ‘PubG’. After gaining instant fame, Fortnite was infamously accused of copying PubG, since it stole most of PubG’s players. As of November 2018, PubG has lost over half its users, which is evident in Steamcharts.com’s data. However, we have yet to answer our question. Is Fortnite still popular?

 

 

Supposedly, it is. Although many players, including myself, are now claiming that the game is ‘dead’ or that no one plays it anymore, there is data suggesting otherwise. To break the ice, Fortnite set its record of 3.4 million concurrent players all the way back in January, which was 10 months ago. In this lengthy a period of time, one would expect a growing game like Fortnite to break its own record, however, there were no reports of the game getting even close to that number. From this, we could assume that the player count is going down, but we know that is not the case.

 

Fortnite has reported having an average player count of 40 million every month, but this figure skyrocketed upwards of 80 million players in August, according to PCGamesn.com. This proves Fortnite is still growing, all the while, PubG’s player numbers continually decreases. Reasons for PubG’s decreasing popularity could be its large price tag, the fact that it isn’t available on consoles such as PS4, its appeal to a smaller audience, and also its difficulty and complexity, making it harder for new players to pick up.

Due to the lack of data proving Fortnite’s continual growth, there is another platform we can turn to if we wished to check Fortnite’s popularity. That platform is Twitch.tv.Fortnite is the most streamed and watched game on Twitch, and its most popular streamer is Ninja. Should we look at Ninja’s viewership growth, we can certainly see a trend that shows an increase in average views (green line below). This shows that Fortnite content is still keeping players interested.

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It may seem impossible how Fortnite’s developer Epic game’s manages to keep up with tens of millions of users, but they seem to do an exceptional job. Their constant updates and small tweaks, additions and changes to the game help keep things fresh for regular players. In addition, the games friendly nature and lack of a price tag, manage to keep raking in a surplus of new players. For the foreseeable future, Fortnite will remain the king of the hill.


Sources

https://steamcharts.com/app/578080#All

https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-vs-pubg-map-players-graphics-gameplay-weapons-review

https://newatlas.com/fortnite-popularity/55455/

https://www.twitchmetrics.net/g/33214-fortnite

By: Krishiv Chadha MYP5

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