Fortnite Racks Up Another 8.3 Million Concurrent Player Count

In a recent interview, Epic Games Korea spokesperson Sung Chul Park stated that Fortnite has exceeded 8.3 million concurrent players. This announcement arrived after the game’s debut in South Korea earlier this week. In February 2018, Fortnite was at 3.4 million concurrent players. That means in eight months, the game has increased its number of simultaneous players by 142%.

While there’s also Save the World mode, most players who flock to Fortnite are there for the free-to-play battle royale experience. Making battle royale mode free was, in hindsight, a game changer for the title. In just twenty-four hours, one million players (total) had played the mode when it launched back in September 2017. With Epic Games aiming to make Save the World free-to-play, things will likely only expand from here.

Of course, with that many people playing at once, the big test will be if the servers can handle it. The team has struggled with this in the past. Most recently, the introduction of Playground Mode led to serious matchmaking issues that forced Epic to create a separate server cluster for the mode. In a postmortem on this issue, Epic realized it’s best to roll things out more slowly and were humbled by the fact that these complex systems can fail in unpredictable ways. We’ll see how the company continues to handle its popularity.

[Source: Gamasutra and VG247]