Step down from the throne, PUBG, because another battle-royale game had just surpassed the record on the most numbers of concurrent players. That’s right, Epic Games Fortnite has beaten the record, hitting a new peak of 3.4 million concurrent players last February 4.
The news was confirmed by Epic Games in a blog post. A remarkable achievement as it is, but the massive load of players was unexpected and caused “six partial and total service disruptions.” As Epic explained, Fortnite has gone from 60,000 concurrent players to 3.4 million in just a few months and led to some scalability issues. To solve such issues, Epic is working hard to expand its server system to accommodate the growing number of players.
Fortnite was first released in early access in July 2017 as a co-op sandbox survival video game. It is set in a contemporary world with zombie-like creatures. The game was described by Epic as a cross between Left 4 Dead 2 and Minecraft. The game gained a lot of attention, but it wasn’t until September 2017 when Epic decided to release a standalone mode for the game that it brought in millions of players.
The standalone mode was based on the battle-royale genre called Fortnite: Battle Royale and was released for free for Microsoft Windows PCs and gaming laptops, Mac OS devices, PlayStation 4 and XBox One. The game instantly became a hit and gained over 10 million players two weeks after it was released.
Due to its popularity, Epic has split off a separate development team for the battle-royale mode to focus on its improvement. The game has rapidly consumed Epic’s time and resources. This eventually led to the reduce development efforts on their games with lower player populations. In fact, Epic announced that their free-to-play MOBA game Paragon is shutting down on April. This leads us to think they are transferring the game’s development team to help with Fortnite: Battle Royale.
Let’s watch Fortnite: Battle Royale’s trailer:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gUtfBmw86Y]