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.
Battle pass
The popularity of battle passes grew in 2018 with the use in Epic Games's "Fortnite Battle Royale", which released in September 2017. The free-to-play "Fortnite Battle Royale" adopted a "season"-driven release schedule, each season lasting 10 weeks, during which they offered a new set of cosmetic items and emotes. The battle pass approach was added starting in its second season, during a time when the game was seeing a large growth in its player base, and has been used by the game since. Battle passes are purchased through an in-game currency (V-bucks) which either must be purchased with real-world funds via microtransactions, or earned via the "Fortnite: Save the World" cooperative game mode. Analyst Michael Pachter estimated that on the first day of the third season, in February 2018, Epic sold more than five million battle passes, generating over in revenue in a single day. With expansion of "Fortnite" to mobile devices in March 2018, revenue estimates from the game were in the hundreds of millions of dollars per month in the following months, primarily from battle pass sales.