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.

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 944,484 peak concurrent players in the last recorded month, July 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 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.

Published by Activision, Call of Duty (CoD) is a popular first person shooter video game series which first launched in 2003. The most successful game in the franchise is Call of Duty: Black Ops, which has sold over 30 million units worldwide since it was first released in 2010.

The continued success of CoD While the franchise was originally created exclusively for Windows, later versions were made available for numerous other platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and OS X. In 2020, Activision branched out even further and released Call of Duty: Warzone, a free-to-play online battle royale game which pits up to 150 players against each other at one time. Within two months of its release, Warzone had amassed 60 million players across the globe, rivaling some of the other battle royale giants on the market, including Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Call of Duty goes mobile Although Call of Duty is traditionally seen as a console game, the mobile edition has also been a great success. In the first few months after its release in October 2019, the game amassed 250 million downloads worldwide, far eclipsing the respective downloads of its shooter rivals, PUBG Mobile and Fortnite. The biggest regional market for the mobile game was the United States, where it was downloaded 28.5 million times in the first two months of its release. Indeed, players in the United States spent more than 36 million U.S. dollars combined on in-game purchases within the mobile app in the first two months after the game's release.