Fortnite Battle Royale Attracts A Million Players on Launch

Fortnite’s new offshoot, Battle Royale, has managed to gather one million players on launch day. The pretty impressive numbers indicate that it could easily be strong competition to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. The fact that Battle Royale is free and multiplatform is probably one of the reasons why it gained so much popularity quickly.

The decision of Epic Games to dip their toes into the newly-formed Battle Royale genre has been well-publicized. A large part of the coverage has been around PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer, Bluehole, Inc. pretty much accusing Epic Games for plagiarism. Well, they’re not about to get any happier. According to the official Fortnite Twitter, the Battle Royale offshoot manage to gather a total of one million players on launch day. That’s about as strong a start as you can wish for.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is still well ahead, with 1.4 million players on Steam (via Polygon). Still, tough, that’s a little too close for comfort. Fortnite Battle Royale can support up to 100 players, just like PUBG, but it has two major advantages. For one, it’s multiplatform; you can download it on Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4, while PUBG remains a PC-only game. An Xbox version is in the works, but that’s far down the pipeline. The second, and much stronger advantage, is that Fortnite Battle Royale is free. Meanwhile, PUBG costs thirty bucks. It even has loot boxes, and it’s still in Early Access.

It’s going to be pretty interesting to see how this will pan out from here. If Bluehole was worried about their position as king of the Battle Royale genre before, the success of Fortnite will do nothing to help that. Now, it’s quite possible that Fortnite will never reach the heights of PUBG, just like Paladins will never be Overwatch. That being said, though, there’s no denying that Fortnite has made it pretty big pretty fast. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.