Fortnite exceeds 200 million registered users

Battle Royale phenomenon Fortnite has now accrued more than 200 million registered users, according to creator Epic Games.

The milestone was revealed in marketing material for the game’s launch in South Korea. The figure represents a 60 per cent increase since Epic last reported its user base numbers in June 2018 – then said to be some 125 million players.

The figure represents registered users, rather than active players. However, Epic recently claimed a new record in concurrent players of 8.4 million, which it said it reached in November 2018.

In August 2018, the game reached a milestone 78.3 million unique players for the entire month, across console, PC and mobile platforms, according to Epic. In comparison, Valve’s Steam sees around five million peak players across all of its games at once, according to analytics site Steam Spy.

Since Fornite’s launch in 2017, Epic Games’ value has soared to more than $8 billion, up from $825 million in 2012. According to market research firm Superdata, Epic had made more than $1 billion via in-game purchases as of May 2018.

The same report claimed that the battle royale genre is the most popular across all gaming platforms, with some 700 million hours of content viewed in a single month, ahead of MOBA in second at 275 million hours.