One hundred YouTube channel hosts combined for a three-hour Fortnite: Battle Royale festival, resulting in 1 million concurrent viewers and a total of 42 million live views over the course of the event.
Spanish-language YouTuber Rubén Doblas, better known as elrubiusOMG, organised a Fortnite: Battle Royale tournament that brought together 100 content creators and over 1 million simultaneous viewers.
Fellow livestreaming site Twitch TV, owned by Amazon with a primary focus on video game content, recently attracted over 635,000 viewers when popular host Tyler Blevins (aka Ninja) teamed up with hip-hop icon Drake, fellow rapper Travis Scott, and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster, also in Fortnite: Battle Royale, on the evening of March 15.
ElrubiusOMG aimed for a larger-scale event, a March 25 YouTuber tournament, and one which YouTube's head of gaming has now confirmed drew in 42 million total views over the course of three and a half hours (per Polygon's reporting).
The fast-paced last-person-standing game allows players to rapidly assemble modular fortesses and walkways on the fly, either solo or in small teams, as they are ushered closer and closer together by an approaching electrical storm.
Free-to-play and championing a more soft-edged, cartoon aesthetic, it instantly became a robust competitor for its apparent inspiration, paid-access PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, upon its late 2017 introduction.
Both Fortnite and PUBG have since released free mobile versions; Fortnite, developed by middleware studio Epic Games, boasts optional cross-platform play between mobile, computer, and console editions.
PUBG, meanwhile, allows players to participate in its in-game economy not only as buyers but also as merchants, selling the virtual items they acquire and, in theory, providing a way to recoup the game's purchase price; it is to introduce a smaller, more compact and more intense island setting that could reduce the experiential gap between itself and Fortnite in April 2018. — AFP Relaxnews
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