Fortnite’s battle royale mode is gaining popularity alongside PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and set a new record for simultaneous active players in February. But how many are playing right now? A trace!
Fortnite: Battle Royale is growing. The game has long arrived in pop culture and has become a mass phenomenon. But how many players does Fortnite actually have currently? This question is not so easy to answer. The site PCGamer still tried – and we don’t want to withhold the result from you.
How can the player counts of Fortnite be determined? Unfortunately, not in a straightforward way. The authority over the player counts lies solely with the developer Epic. Since Fortnite has its own launcher on PC, player counts cannot simply be read off (as is the case on Steam).
Epic also does not publish player counts broken down by mode. Therefore, how the player base is divided between the battle royale mode and the PvE part “Save the World” is unknown.
However, conclusions can be drawn based on the revenue generated. And these are consistently impressive. In February alone, Epic earned approximately 105 million euros with Fortnite, according to SuperDataResearch – and left PUBG significantly behind (approximately 88 million euros).
In addition to revenue, the player counts are also impressive. While Fortnite was able to bind 2 million players simultaneously in January, 3.4 million concurrent players in February set a record.
These are also the last numbers that Epic has published. Since then, Epic has not released any new figures.
According to analyses, one in three plays a battle royale game on PC
The analysts around Newzoo have determined that in March 2018, 30.1% of players were playing a battle royale game on PC. According to these figures, 16.3% were for Fortnite – PUBG engaged around 14.6%. The figures are based on a tracking tool called Overwolf, which has at least 12 million players installed.
Unfortunately, the analysts did not provide absolute numbers, which can at least be found for PUBG via SteamCharts. According to SteamCharts, an average of 1.1 million people played PUBG (data from April 2018), with a peak of 2.5 million concurrent players.
These figures only apply to PC. However, since Fortnite is also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the shooter, which is also free-to-play, is likely to have a significant lead over its competitors.
Furthermore, Fortnite is a massive success on iOS and generates significant revenue there.
What direction is Fortnite heading? Undoubtedly upwards. Following the impressive revenues of around 105 million euros in February, 186 million euros followed in March.
Through collaborations like the current Marvel mashup and always new game modes, Fortnite will remain attractive in the future and attract new players – after all, the battle royale mode is free-to-play compared to PUBG. And the China launch is already planned.
Update 13.6. 2018: There are now concrete player numbers for Fortnite via the China partner Tencent:
