Fortnite reached another milestone over the weekend, crossing 3.4 million concurrent players. For those keeping track of the battle of battle royales, that total just squeaks by PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds' (PUBG) concurrent player record of 3.2 million on Steam (via PCGamer).
The surge in players didn't come without its issues, however. Epic revealed the milestone in a rather lengthy post detailing the issues its servers hit under the massive load over the weekend, as well as some of the steps the team is taking to shore up server availability going forward. The whole thing is a pretty technical deep dive, but Epic sums things up by stating that it is actively taking a serious look at each incident to identify the root cause and come up with a solution.
Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now. We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action. The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base.
PUBG has so far been the poster boy of the quickly growing Battle Royale genre, and its popularity has surged over the past year. Fortnite, however, is clearly gaining in mindshare with its own free-to-play Battle Royale mode, having surged from 60 thousand concurrent players to 3.4 million in a matter of months. Epic doesn't specify platforms, but the latest number presumably cover PC and consoles combined. It's worth noting that, while Fortnite's 3.4 million tops PUBG's previous record of 3.2 million, the PUBG figure didn't take into account players on Xbox One, a platform where the game had already garnered a total of 3 million players as of the last count.
Are you enjoying Fortnite? Let us know in the comments where you stand on the Battle Royale genre's rise.
Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the Editor in Chief for Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. Got a hot tip? Send it to daniel.thorp-lancaster@futurenet.com.
