Fortnite Battle Royale
The idea for "Fortnite Battle Royale" arose following the release of the similar battle royale game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds", which saw numerous player count records broken throughout 2017. Seeing its rapid growth and commercial success, Epic Games saw the opportunity to create a battle royale mode of their own. Originally released as part of the paid "Fortnite" game, Epic spun out a dedicated version of the game offered as free-to-play funded by microtransactions, sharing in-game currency with the main "Fortnite" game, allowing players to buy or earn cosmetic items to customize their character, as well as completing challenges through a battle pass to earn additional rewards. , the game has seen over 200 million players, and has been estimated to have earned in microtransactions. "Fortnite Battle Royale" has become a cultural phenomenon, with streams of the game achieving record-high viewerships, and with several high-profile celebrities stating their appreciation of the game.
Fortnite Battle Royale
Individual platform releases saw initial surges in player counts. Within a day of becoming available, the Nintendo Switch version had been downloaded over 2 million times, according to Nintendo. Epic said that "Fortnite" had been downloaded over 15 million times for Android within three weeks of its launch. On the release of Season 5 in July 2018, Akamai Technologies reported that "Fortnite" traffic neared 37 terabytes per second, the largest recorded amount of traffic for any video game that they have observed. With its quarterly financial report ending September 30, 2018, Nintendo said that "Fortnite Battle Royale" had been downloaded on about half of all Switch systems they have sold, representing about 11.5 million downloads.