Fortnite has just had the biggest day in its entire history. Over 44.7 million players dropped from the Battle Bus over the weekend, totalling 102 million hours of play in just 24 hours, thanks to the arrival of Fortnite OG. If you’re a maths person, that’s over 11,600 years worth of victory royales and Tilted Towers shootouts. In ONE day.
This unparalleled success comes as no surprise, with Fortnite’s newest season launching on Friday with a great deal of hype. Players from the battle royale’s heyday have been rallying around a return to the OG map after subsequent seasons saw iconic locations like Tilted Towers and Greasy Grove destroyed or simply replaced.
Beyond the re-introduction of the Chapter 1 map, weapons and tools like the shopping trolley have been “unvaulted,” and clearly players are going absolutely feral for it if numbers are anything to go by. Plenty of users on X (formerly Twitter) are begging Epic Games to retain the OG map for a bit longer than just the season’s runtime, or even introduce it as a permanent fixture in a separate game mode.
Fortnite will be regularly updated throughout the season, according to Epic Games, and “each major update will bring a different phase of the battle royale’s past.” An Epic blog post outlines some of the changes coming with Fortnite OG, which is starting off with a throwback to Chapter 1, Season 5, with subsequent updates each week heralding in throwbacks to further Chapter 1 seasons. 9th November will see a Season 6-inspired update, with seasons 7-8 on 16 November, and finally seasons 9 and X on 23 November.
Beyond the absolutely massive amount of players and play-time yesterday, which smashes any records the battle royale juggernaut set during its prime, player count trackers estimate Fortnite peaked at 5 million concurrent players in 24 hours across all modes, which is roughly double what it averaged for most of the last year.
It’s been a huge week for Fortnite and it’s looking like Chapter 4 Season 5 is going to continue on this upwards trajectory thanks to the nostalgia factor.
Most importantly, gamers; where we droppin’?
Lead Image Credit: Epic Games
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