Fortnite tops PUBG’s high with 3.4 million concurrent players

Fortnite reached record highs over the weekend, but it wasn’t all good news for Epic’s latest shooter. The game reached a new peak of 3.4 million concurrent players on Sunday, but the massive load led to a number of outages, and Epic have provided a detailed explanation of what went wrong.

You can see the full technical details in the postmortem, but essentially Fortnite is gaining popularity at a rate far beyond Epic’s expectations. They’re working now to identify the specific bottlenecks in their server structure, expand their capacity, and bring more engineers on board in order to make sure they can handle the load.

The good part of the news is that 3.4 million concurrent users is a massively impressive new record, especially since it tops PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ high of 3.2 million. Epic reported a peak of 2 million just a few weeks ago, so there’s been some very rapid growth for the game. These numbers are spread across what are essentially two separate games including a free Battle Royale mode, and they include PC and two home consoles. PUBG is paid across the board, and is only available on PC and Xbox One - and the concurrent user numbers we can see only include the Steam version.

But Fortnite is also not yet officially available in China, and that country has proven to be the biggest contributor to PUBG’s success. Outside the genre, Riot have reported a 7.5 million concurrent user record for League of Legends, and that number’s from well over a year ago. There’s still plenty of room for battle royale games to grow.