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Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode hits 800,000 concurrent players

Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode hits 800,000 concurrent players

The battle royale genre continues to prove itself as being immensely popular.

Epic’s Fortnite: Battle Royale has broken 800,000 concurrent players, according to the game’ official Twitter account (below). In fact, the exact figure was 811,000. This has caused some issues for the multiplayer title, with the firm apologising for tech issues.

The mode launched in September, while the base Fortnite game was released in July. The Battle Royale mode is free-to-play, which is likely partly responsible for this high concurrent player base. By comparison, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has smashed 2.4m concurrent players and has a £26.99 RRP.

Epic and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds firm Bluehole have come into conflict recently. The latter was not happy with being name-dropped in the announcement of Fortnite: Battle Royale. While initially, this looked like a tussle over who ‘owned’ the battle royale genre, in fact, it seemed that Bluehole had concerns about Epic building the game, considering that it is working with the company’s Unreal Engine 4 tech.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.