'Fortnite' Now Has More Concurrent Players Than 'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds'
"PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" by Bluehole Studios may have been the game to spark the Battle Royale gameplay that's all the rage since last year, but Epic's "Fortnite" has caught up quickly.
Last Sunday, Feb. 4, "Fortnite" has snatched the crown from "PUBG" by setting a new record of 3.4 million concurrent players, a peak that actually brought the game servers down. It's a new record that Epic Games has just officially acknowledged this Thursday, Feb. 8, in a post explaining why their servers went down over the past weekend.
It turned out that 3.4 million concurrent players are just about all that Epic's infrastructure can handle, as "Fortnite" beats the previous record of around 3.2 million on Steam, set by "PUBG." The number could have been even higher, if not for the outages that "Fortnite" experienced on Feb. 3 and Feb. 4 at the peak.
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Epic Games is currently pressed not just for server capacity, but also on manpower, as well. The studio has been diverting talent from their other projects to funnel them full-time into "Fortnite," eventually shutting down their free-to-play MOBA game "Paragon" in the process on Jan. 27.
"Also, Epic Games needs YOU! If you have domain expertise to solve problems like these, and you'd like to contribute to Fortnite and other efforts, join Epic in Seattle, North Carolina, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, UK, Stockholm, Seoul, or elsewhere!" Epic wrote in their news post in a bid to recruit more staff to support "Fortnite," which is now buckling under its exploding fan base.
Meanwhile, "PUBG" has recorded around 3.14 million concurrent players on PC as of the last weekend, as IGN notes. The total number of "PUBG" players could be higher, given that the game has been available as a timed exclusive for the Xbox One for some time now.
On the other hand, "Fortnite" has not provided a breakdown of platforms that make up their 3.4 million figure. Epic Games does point out that "Fortnite" has gone from a previous peak of 60,000 concurrent users to more than three million in just a span of a few months to perhaps be the "biggest PC/console game in the world," as the studio claims.
