Fortnite
"Fortnite Battle Royale" has also become a cultural online phenomenon, with several celebrities reporting they play the game, and athletes using "Fortnite" emotes as victory celebrations. A notable streaming event in March 2018, with streamer Ninja playing "Fortnite Battle Royale" alongside Drake, Travis Scott, Kim DotCom, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, broke viewership records for Twitch to date, and led to Epic arranging a "Fortnite Battle Royale" pro–am with 50 pairs of streamers and professional players matched with celebrities at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018 in June 2018. Epic Games is working to develop organized eSports competitions around "Fortnite Battle Royale", including a "Fortnite" World Cup tournament in 2019.
Fortnite: Save the World
"Fortnite"s early development hit a number of roadblocks. First, Epic began using "Fortnite" as the testing ground for the new Unreal Engine 4, which slowed some development. A further factor was recognizing that to maintain interest in the game, it needed to have deep systems for player progression and itemization, similar to computer role-playing games. They reached out and brought in system designers from popular massively multiplayer online games, including Darren Sugg, to gain input on how to create these types of systems. A culminating issue in the slowdown was the investment from Tencent in Epic Games in 2012, which transitioned a number of high-level executives, including Bleszinski, out of the company. Epic had recognized they needed to prepare for offering games that followed the games as a service model. Tencent had excelled at this in China, and agreed to help Epic in exchange for significant ownership in Epic. Epic choose to use "Fortnite" as the spearhead for Epic's games-as-a-service model which created additional road bumps, according to Mustard. Further, with the transition of executives, new leadership was needed to take over for "Fortnite"s development team. Sugg, for example, had been discussing the various game systems in depth with Bleszinski, who otherwise was leading the design. With Bleszinski's departure, Sugg had to take over as lead design to try to continue the vision that Bleszinski's team had.