As of June 2020, battle royale star Fortnite had approximately 80.4 million monthly active users worldwide. This is up from 78.3 million MAU in September 2018. The cross-platform title which was released in July 2017 has been popular right from the start and reported 350 million registered users worldwide in 2020.

How many people play Fortnite? After bursting onto the scene in 2017, Fortnite has since become a worldwide phenomenon, amassing 650 million players across the globe as of November 2023, up from 400 million in May 2021. Why is Fortnite so popular? The reasons Fortnite has become such a global hit are clear. Not only is the game free to play, but it is also available on most gaming platforms. On top of this, Fortnite's most popular gameplay mode is the battle royale mode, in which up to 100 players fight it at once. This means that the re-playability of the game is infinite – each game is unique. Keeping players engaged with live services Fortnite Battle Royale is also a live service game, meaning that the game receives regular content updates to keep players engaged. Each season of the game roughly lasts 10 weeks and features events such as online concerts, and cosmetic changes. The game’s current iteration is called "鬼HUNTERS (Demon HUNTERS)" with a theme around yōkai, hunters and Japanese culture. Live service games are here to stay By offering cross-platform, multiplayer gaming with a live service schedule, Fortnite covers two of the biggest gaming industry trends, which the majority of the industry intend to follow. A 2023 of global gaming studios found that more than nine in ten studios were either working on or intending to release a live services title. With regular, cadenced, and themed updates to free-to-play games, studios motivate players to keep returning and, eventually, spend not only time but also money on the game. This seems to work for the parent company Epic Games – Fortnite was one of the most downloaded PlayStation F2P game in the EU and North America in 2024.

Since its release in 2017, Fortnite has become one of the most popular games in the world. The Battle Royale game, in which up to 100 players fight it out at one time until one player is left standing, generated revenue of 340 U.S. dollars in December 2019, more an increase of 150 million U.S. dollars compared to the precious month.

Fortnite – the money maker With 350 million users registered worldwide in early 2020, it is no wonder that Fortnite is making its developers, Epic Games, a lot of money. The game has found the most success in the United States, where it generated a staggering 75 million U.S. dollars in its first year after release. Given the nature of the game and the trend in gaming as a whole, it will come as no shock that the vast majority of Fortnite players in the United States were male, with over 85 percent falling into the 18-34 age category.

In-game purchases key to success Given that Fortnite is a free-to-play game, how does it generate such a vast amount of revenue? The answer lies, as with many other commercially successful free-to-play games, in in-game purchases. According to a survey carried out in the United States in February 2020, about 77 percent of Fortnite players admitted to making in-game purchases. Using their hard-earned cash to purchase V-Bucks, gamers then use the game’s currency to buy upgrades ranging from outfits and characters to gliders. What’s more, almost 10 percent of U.S. Fortnite players confessed to spending money on emotes, which allow their character to celebrate their kills and victories with elaborate dance moves.

Fortnite is one of the most popular video games across the world, with the battle royale title racking up a global user count of over 350 million. In September 2020, Fortnite record almost 30 million monthly active users across all video game consoles.

It seemed that the coronavirus outbreak and its consequences had also an impact on app consumption. According to Airnow, the number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app in Denmark exceeded 38 thousand in April 2020. This was the highest amount of DAU of the royal battle gaming app in the past year, and a considerable increase of over ten thousand compared to the previous month.

According to a February 2020 survey of Fortnite gamers in the United States, 34 percent of respondents played Fortnite roughly six to ten hours per week, while five percent admitted to playing for 21 weekly hours or more.

The number of daily active users of the iOS Fortnite app more than doubled in Norway within the period from March to May 2020. According to Airnow, the royal battle gaming app recorded over 50 thousand daily active users in May.

Within 24 hours of release on March 10, 2020, multiplayer sensation Call of Duty: Warzone amassed six million active players worldwide. This number grew to surpass 100 million downloads after only 13 months on the market.

Call of Duty franchise

Call of Duty is a popular first-person shooter video game series published by Activision. First launched in 2003, the franchise now features many of the world’s top-grossing video games, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War, and other fan favorites. While the CoD universe continues to draw audiences with annual main series releases for PC and gaming consoles, it was the franchise’s recent dive into the world of mobile gaming and free-to-play releases that created its biggest gaming buzz in years.

Warzone sets the tone

Call of Duty: Warzone is the franchise’s first free-to-play (F2P) online multiplayer game. It debuted as a battle royale mode for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on March 10, 2020, and considering that this launch coincided with the first wave of lockdowns in the United States and many other countries alike, it comes as no surprise that the multiplayer game (which pits up to 150 players against one another) has become a smash hit. Not only was the title nominated as the best multiplayer game at the 2020 Game Awards, but Warzone’s instant success also translated to the streaming world: As of 2021, Warzone ranked among the ten most popular games on Twitch based on peak all-time viewers.

From March 2019 to March 2020, the number of downloads of the Fortnite app on the Apple App Store decreased. Data provided by Airnow indicated that the gaming app was downloaded roughly 55 thousand times in March 2019 and about 30 thousand times during March 2020.

Apex Legends became an instant hit on its release in February 2019. Despite the growth in players slowing down in the months after the game's initial release, Apex Legends crossed 170 million players life-to-date as of October 2024. Apex Legends popular among eSports fans Apex Legends is a battle royale game which pits up to 20 three-person squads against each other in a fight to the death an island. While the game evidently has millions of devoted players, many more experience the game through some of their favorite eSports players. The Respawn Entertainment game is consistently one of the top games streamed on Twitch, with Apex Legends viewers watching in their thousands to see teams battle it out. In June 2024, approximately 7 million hours of Apex Legends were watched on major livestreaming platorms worldwide, making it one of the most popular games on Twitch and illustrating its appeal to both players and viewers alike. The rise of battle royale Battle royale games often include hundreds of players competing against each other at one time and this large-scale game mode has become increasingly popular in recent years thanks to the success of games such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG). While many of the games are free to play, players can invest money on in-game purchases, which include upgrades to characters and players. Indeed, player spending in battle royale games often runs into the thousands and spending on PUBG Mobile even surpassed the 1.6 billion U.S. dollar mark in September 2020.

First released in 2017 and developed by Epic Games, Fortnite is an online battle royal video game with the objective of being the last survivor and eliminating other opposing players. As a result of the game's great success, a mobile version was released on iOS and Android the following year. The mobile game amassed over six million downloads worldwide in April 2020 alone. This sharp growth in downloads is no doubt in part due to the coronavirus pandemic, which spread across the world at the beginning of 2020 and led to many people turning to gaming and other forms of indoor entertainment during periods of lockdown.

Action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong topped the 2024 list for peak number of concurrent players on the online gaming platform Steam, with 2.4 million peak concurrent players. The action-adventure game Palworld, which was released in January 2024, was ranked second. Is Steam keeping pace with the console giants? The fight for supremacy between PC and console gamers is an eternal one. However, it seems that Steam, the main online PC gaming platform, can still keep up with the console giants. In January 2023, Steam registered a record 33 million simultaneous users at peak time, impressive considering the figure stood at 27.4 million just two years before. One of the main advantages of Steam is the staggering library of games available to users, and it appears that players are not afraid of splashing the cash to play their favorite games.   Battle of the Battle Royale games While PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds reigns supreme in the Steam universe, it has stiff competition in the form of its battle royale brother, Fortnite. First released in July 2017, and not available on Steam, free-to-play Fortnite very quickly amassed millions of players and soon became a worldwide hit. Having scooped the award for Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2018, Epic Games’ smash hit shows no signs of slowing down. But with new players, such as Apex Legends, constantly entering the game, will Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds be able to hold on to their loyal fan bases?

First released at the start of 2017, PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds) is one of the most popular games on Steam and had 786,821 peak concurrent players in the last recorded month, January 2025. The highest number of concurrent players was recorded in January 2018 at 3.24 million. One of the biggest games on Steam PUBG gained a devoted legion of fans in a short space of time after its release, and cumulative unit sales of the game hit 75 million in December 2021. The game has also been critically acclaimed — it won the Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards in 2017 and its free-to-play mobile version for Android and iOS, released in 2018, was nominated for Best Mobile Game at The 2018 Game Awards. This critical success has also translated into commercial success, as the game generated millions of U.S. dollars of revenue, most successfully in the United States. On January 12, 2022, the game has become free to play. Battle of the Battle Royale games PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is an online battle royale game in which up to 100 hundred players battle it out until there is only one player or one team left standing. This format of game has become very popular in recent years. While PUBG has a strong following, especially on Steam, it has come under pressure from rival battle royale game, Fortnite. First released just several months after PUBG, Fortnite has since become a cultural phenomenon, amassing 500 million registered users in just six years. As of 2025, both PUB and Fortnite are still going strong with their loyal audiences.

In September 2023, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) was upgraded to Counter-Strike 2. As of January 2025, Counter-Strike 2 had 1.59 million peak concurrent players on Steam, up from 1.56 million during the month of the game's update, and down from a peak of 1.62 million players in April 2024. CS2 completely replaced CSGO on Steam. Counter Strike still going strong Despite the fact that CS:GO was in August 2012, the game was very popular online and has developed a cult following until its replacement by Counter-Strike 2. CS2 is the fifth game in the Counter-Strike series of games. As with its predecessors, the game takes the form of a multiplayer first-person shooter in which two teams are pitted against each other in various different game modes. After more than a decade, the game's sequel was published on Steam. Not just a game for the gamers While millions of gamers have fun playing Counter-Strike, millions more watch official tournaments online. With such a large fanbase, it is unsurprising that these eSports tournaments are worth big money. The annual cumulative tournament prize pool for the game stood at 20.83 million U.S. dollars in 2024, an increase from the previous year. Gamers are therefore in line for big paydays if they do well in these tournaments, with Danil Kryshkovets, known by his online alias donk, being the top-earning Counter-Strike 2 eSports player worldwide.

In 2022, the multi-platform free-to-play (F2P) gaming title Fortnite generated an estimated 4.4 billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues. This figure decreased from the previous year when the battle royale title made about 4.8 billion U.S. dollars in revenues.

While streaming sites like Twitch and Youtube are blocked in China, however, domestic players Huya Live and Doyu Live are vying to be the Chinese equivalents. In the last quarter of 2020, the monthly active user number of Huya Live reached 178.5 million for the first time, indicating 18.8 percent increase from the corresponding quarter in the previous year.

Huya Live - China’s Twitch

In 2014, the Chinese online video company YY Inc. established Huya as a game live streaming business unit. The platform soon operated independently and went public in New York in 2018, raising 327 million U.S. dollars in a follow-on share offering. With exclusive broadcast rights of major eSports tournaments, Huya registered about six million paying users in the last quarter of 2020. In 2020, its net revenue totaled around 10.9 billion yuan, a major chunk was generated by the live stream segment. In October 2020, Huya announced a plan to acquire its local rival Douyu, which will make Tencent the big gaming winner as it owns shares in both companies.

The lucrative eSports sector

In 2019, China had as many as 440 million eSports users and 620 million mobile gamers. Overall, Chinese eSports fans constituted 40 percent of the global online audience of eSports tournaments as of July 2019. As opposed to the West, monetization of Chinese streaming platforms relies primarily on audience rewards instead of advertising which contributed only five percent of the total revenue. However, eSports ad spending has been rising as most Chinese eSports fans are positive about brand sponsorships.

In 2024, video game publisher and software developer Epic Games is projected to generate approximately 5.8 billion U.S. dollars in gross revenues, up from 5.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

How does Epic Games make money? Epic Games' gross does not only include game revenue from the company battle royale hit Fortnite, but also engine revenue derived from game licenses and royalties, as well as Unreal Engine assets. Epic is the developer of the gaming engine Unreal Engine, which is currently monetized under a royalty model, meaning that is can be downloaded for free and Epic claims a percentage of sales revenue. Currently, Epic is not claiming a fee for developers that publish their games on the Epic Games Store. The Epic Games Store (EGS) was launched in December 2018. In May 2020, Epic announced that their share of royalties for games developed in Unreal Engine are waived until developers have earned their first 1 million U.S. dollars in revenue. Other income streams of the company include Epic Games Store revenue, and Merchandise and other revenue. Epic Games Store upsetting the industry standard One of the biggest headlines regarding the launch of Epic’s own digital storefront was the company’s attitude to developer / store revenue split. Gaming stores and app platforms including Valve’s Steam, the Apple App Store, or Google Play, usually take a 30 percent commission cut from game sales and in-game revenues. The Epic Games Store was released with the announcement that the EGS would only claim 12 percent of revenue, leaving 88 percent to the developers. This approach, as well as Epic’s attempt to circumvent Apple’s monetization strategies in the iOS app of Fortnite, has made many headlines, led to Apple removing the app from its App Store, and resulted in the still ongoing lawsuit Epic vs. Apple.

In 2020, Fortnite was the leading console game title based on number of monthly active users (MAU) worldwide on Xbox and PlayStation. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was the Nintendo Switch title with the biggest monthly active audience during the measured period.

Since it was first released by developer Bluehole in March 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has developed a loyal legion of fans. While the battle royale game only sold two million copies within the first few months of its Early Access release on Steam, this number had jumped to 50 million units just a year later in June 2018. As of December 2021, PUGB has sold over 75 million units worldwide on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. In January 2022, the game became free to play, meaning a purchase of the game was no longer necessary to play

One of the biggest games on Steam PUBG is an online multiplayer game which pits up to 100 players against each other at one time. The players must scavenge for weapons and items while killing enemies and trying to survive. The map shrinks over time in order to force the remaining players into combat until only one player or team is left standing. Given the scale of the game, it is unsurprising that it attracts large amounts of players – on the gaming platform Steam, PUBG peaked at almost 3.24 million concurrent players in January 2018. The game is also one of Steam’s biggest draws in terms of hourly average number of players – PUBG averaged almost 177.11 thousand players per hour in 2021. So is the game unrivalled in the battle royale genre?

PUBG’s biggest rival Not if you ask fans of Fortnite. Released by Epic Games in July 2017, just a few months after the launch of PUBG, Fortnite is a similar battle royale survival game. While it is not available on Steam, it can be played on PC as well as on all the main consoles. Similarly to PUBG, Fortnite became an overnight sensation and latest figures have the game at a staggering 350 million registered users. The mobile version of the game has also been a commercial success, generating annual revenue of 455 million U.S. dollars in the Apple App Store in 2018. Given that PUBG won the Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2017 and Fortnite won the very same award a year later, it seems that the rivalry between these games shows no signs of slowing down.

In March 2025, Fortnite was the top battle royale title across Twitch with more than 12 million weekly viewer hours. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was published by Activision Blizzard, was ranked third with 4.7 million viewership hours during the measured period.