The Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, participated in the tournament Friday Fortnite on Friday, despite apparently having little knowledge of Fortnite. He played three rounds together with Twitch star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, which will probably go down in history.
What was this event like? Friday Fortnite is a gigantic showcase battle from the community. The content creator Keemstar is an effective and quite unashamed promoter for this tournament and for himself.
Keemstar always invites the “biggest names” he can get for Friday Fortnite to reach as many viewers as possible. The streamers and YouTubers broadcast the showcase battle on their own channels.
It doesn’t matter that popular stars on Twitch and YouTube are often not really good Fortnite players. This rather adds to the general entertainment.
Some players in the tournament, who belong to the absolute elite and are considered favorites for the Duo World Cup.
The tournament tree, the Friday Fortnite Bracket (via umg), is designed so that sometimes two top teams meet in the 1st round, while teams with “content stars” are matched against weaker teams, so their fans have something to watch for a long time.
This “special” duo consisted of PewDiePie and Ninja. Ninja is considered a crack in Fortnite – PewDiePie is not. But both are the biggest individuals on their platforms: PewDiePie on YouTube, Ninja on Twitch.
Just before the start of the tournament, DrDisRespect somehow snuck into the lineup and took the place of another player. For stars like the Doctor, it seems Keemstar likes to make exceptions.
The rules turn out to be flexible.
This is how the tournament went for PewDiePie: The first match was aimed at “absolute viewer records” and likely achieved them.
On one side, PewDiePie and Ninja played – on the other stood NoahsNoah and Ceeday, who is also hugely successful on YouTube.
PewDiePie and Ninja managed to win this duel in two matches. The 4 players are then in a squad, so they cannot harm each other, but each hunts for their own kills.
In the next round against DrDisrespect and Arkhram, Ninja and PewDiePie also won, who often teased each other during the stream. The nickname “Ninya” generated by PewDiePie will likely stick.
PewDiePie looked visibly irritated when Ninja explained to him that rap star Drake is clearly a better gamer than him.
Although Ninja and PewDiePie managed to prevail in the first two rounds, it was then over in round 3 against TSM Myth and Liquid Poach, two top Fortnite players. PewDiePie and Ninja lost and had to continue in the “Loser Bracket”.
Shortly after midnight, PewDiePie leaves the tournament
However, PewDiePie then left the tournament because it was apparently too late for him as a European.
Ninja continued with his friend TimTheTatman as a substitute. This was announced at 0:22. However, Ninja and TimTheTatman were ultimately eliminated by the duo of Ghost Kamo and ISSA.
The tournament ran well into the night from our perspective. At 4:42 AM, Keemstar announced the winners on Twitter. Ultimately, two players from FaZe, FaZe Tilt and FaZe Jarvis, won the tournament.
As winners of the tournament, they receive a prize of $10,000 – another $10,000 was awarded to a randomly selected viewer.
When was Twitch Down? During the peak of the evening around 11 PM, both Ninja and KeemStar were sure that they were responsible for a Twitch outage.
In fact, outages at Twitch were reported around 10:55 PM on Friday evening our time. This could also have been contributed to by the gathering of PewDiePie, Ninja, and Ceeday, even though PewDiePie does not stream on Twitch himself.
But KeemStar and Ninja at least attribute the outage to themselves. Ninja reached 284,320 viewers at the peak, and throughout the evening, he had 1,953,799 unique viewers. Ninja’s stream lasted 10:55 hours (via twitter).
This was special: Many liked the chemistry between Ninja and PewDiePie. Ninja apparently felt a spiritual connection with PewDiePie. Ninja said that he often streams for 8 hours, then says one single wrong thing, and that will be dwelled upon forever.
However, PewDiePie cheerfully replied: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
After all, PewDiePie is known for repeatedly clashing with controversial actions and statements.
What’s next? Another Friday Fortnite is expected to take place next week. What will happen after that with the showcase battle is still unclear.
This current tournament only came together under bizarre circumstances. According to Keemstar, Epic should hire him anyway and provide a prize pool of $1 million, because he has proven what fantastic tournaments he can organize. Currently, Keemstar is only allowed to offer a prize pool of $20,000.
Next weekend, a similar spectacle is on the agenda with the “Pro-Am” tournament, but this time officially organized by Epic. It’s about $3 million in prize money for a good cause:
