On September 26, Epic Games released Fortnite Battle Royale, an almost unabashed PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds clone. Today, via Twitter, Epic gave us some numbers. The big one everybody is focusing on, and for good reason, is that as of today Fortnite has reached 10 million downloads.
There are a ton of other numbers there as well -- 44,494,571 hours played, 292,715,319 people jumped from the Battle Bus -- but seriously, 10 Million players in 2 weeks? Seems like Epic rightly predicted that there were a lot of console players who were yearning for a PUBG experience. Not like that was a surprise. It also helps that Fortnite BR is a free download.
What makes this an even crazier story is that if Bluehole hadn't put out that press release when Fortnite BR was announced, it's very much likely that this game would have passed many players by. If you want to snuff out a fire, don't throw gasoline on it.
Fortnite Battle Royale technically isn't the first to release a Battle Royale mode on console, GTAV did something similar, though I hear there's a lot more tanks involved there. Still, it will be interesting if this spurs Bluehole, PUBG Corp, and Microsoft on to push PUBG proper out onto console. After all, I have no doubt that players will gladly shell out for the true PUBG experience.
If other developers and publishers manage to get their own PUBG clones out on console first, could there be PUBG fatigue by the time the true Battlegrounds hits? It's hard to tell, but PUBG Corp better do something fast.
