It’s been two weeks since Epic brought a free-to-play battle royale game to its early access title Fortnite, and the developer says over 10 million players have already sat down to give the mode a try.
That information comes in the form of an infographic shared by Epic that also mentions players have put a combined 44 million hours into the game mode since its launch. Fortnite: Battle Royale does have some advantages over other Battle Royale titles in the wild given its free-to-play nature and presence on both console and PC, but the game’s rising popularity says a lot about the viability of battle royale as a genre.
Fornite: Battle Royale had anything but a quiet launch. Epic publically stated that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was a huge inspiration for the mode, and the Fortnite version does share a considerable amount of features with Battlegrounds. Bluehole, the Korean-based developer behind PUBG notably hit out at Epic for “replicating the experience for which Battlegrounds is known.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds itself is largely credited with the emergence of ‘battle royale’ as a standalone genre. The game itself broke records and passed sales milestones on a near weekly basis and just days ago became the first ever Steam game to amass 2 million concurrent players.
While the number of players currently in Fortnite: Battle Royale pales in comparison, the free-to-play variant is still rapidly attracting players in its own right. As of October 9, Epic noted that Fortnite: Battle Royale alone had managed 3.7 million daily active users with 525,000 peak concurrent players.