Over 600,000 People Have Tuned In To Watch Drake And Ninja Play Fortnite, Smashing Twitch’s Record

Over 600,000 People Have Tuned In To Watch Drake And Ninja Play Fortnite, Smashing Twitch’s Record

We mentioned last week that Fortnite streamer Ninja has gotten so big that rapper Drake was following him on Instagram. Tonight, they hooked up for a game and it crushed the record for most concurrent viewers on a single stream for the service.

After some initial communications issues, and some adorable fan freakout from Ninja’s wife, viewers were able to tune in to see Ninja playing while Drake was on voice comms via Discord (the pair were separated by platforms, with Ninja on PC and Drake on PS4).

Over 600,000 People Have Tuned In To Watch Drake And Ninja Play Fortnite, Smashing Twitch’s Record

As the games wore on, the viewer count exploded, growing from around 200,000 when they first got voice chat working to just under 400,000 thirty minutes later, at which point Drake tweeted a link to his 36.7 million followers, and it really blew up.

There wasn’t just shooting; at one point Ninja asked how long Drake had been playing, who replied that it’s only been a month or two (he’s pretty good), and that he can often spend so long in the studio (15-20 hours at a time) that there’s plenty of time for downtime with stuff like games.

Over 600,000 People Have Tuned In To Watch Drake And Ninja Play Fortnite, Smashing Twitch’s Record

At time of posting the viewer count was at 501,000. If it climbs to a more significant figure we’ll update the post.

[Update – 4:35PM AEDT]: They just cracked 600,000 viewers.

It was only last month that we were talking about a new record of 388,000. Welp.

[UPDATE – 4:59PM AEDT]: Just to make things a little weirder, exiled internet guru and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has jumped on the stream as well.

[UPDATE – 9:04PM AEDT]: OK this got wild. Rapper Travis Scott also joined in, as did Steelers WR JuJu Smith-Schuster.

You can see footage of the session below.

[UPDATE – 9:13PM AEDT]: Clarified in first paragraph that this is the record for most concurrent viewers for a single stream. Figures for the broadcast of major esports events have obviously been much higher.


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