It has been heavily publicized how successful Fortnite has been since releasing the free-to-play battle royale mode at the tail end of September. However, this past weekend, the amount of concurrent users has been the downfall of the game’s servers.
Epic Games confirmed on Twitter that the player count had smashed their own milestone, therefore affecting the servers as a result. This weekend saw over 800,000 concurrent players flock to the free-to-play mode, seeing the game buckle under the weight of the sheer amount of players.
We’re sorry for the trouble this weekend. The Battle Bus had 811K concurrent players on Sunday. We’re working hard to keep it in the air.
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) 30 October 2017
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Despite Fornite’s rise in popularity being steady since launch, it has managed to quickly rack up ten million total downloads. As for the mode that has brought it so much success, it has manged to find itself competing with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which has had a well-documented rise to popularity in recent months. PUBG has so far reached 18.5 million downloads, and hits a concurrent player stat of two million. So Fortnite still has a way to go, but is certainly making up ground on the currently unreleased competition.
Whether or not Fortnite will reach the heights of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds remains to be seen. Given that it has released on consoles already, it does present somewhat of an advantage, particularly with PUBG only releasing on Xbox One initially as far as consoles are concerned.
