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20m people have played Epic's Fortnite

20m people have played Epic's Fortnite

It looks like Epic's Fortnite has hit a new sales milestone. 

The title has been played by 20m people since its summer release. The achievement was announced by developer and publisher Epic Games via the title’s official Twitter account, in which the firm thanked the users who had played the game.

The tweet says that there have been 20m player "across all of Fortnite", while the accompanying video talks exclusively about the Battle Royale mode. 

Given that you need Fortnite to play the Battle Royale mode, it's presumed that this game type has driven sales for the project.

The game mode launched in late September and followed the release of the base game in July. The Battle Royale mode reached 10m players within two weeks of its launch. Furthermore, the game has reached a high of 800,000 concurrent players.

The obvious comparison here is with Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, with some sites claiming that this means the game is more successful than Bluehole’s creation, which has been downloaded 15m times. It’s a bit of a false equivalence when the former costs £26.99, while the Fortnite game mode is entirely free to play.

The launch of Fortnite: Battle Royale has caused friction between Bluehole and Epic Games. The latter named Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds as an influence when it announced Fortnite, which did not go down well.

Given that PUBG is made on Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, it looks like there are concerns that Epic might be using information about Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds’ development to help its own battle royale game.


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.