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.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
Greene said that while he had envisioned the battle royale format to be a spectator sport since his "ARMA II" mod, their approach to making "Battlegrounds" an esport would be a matter of taking "baby steps". Greene said that they would not actively pursue esports until after the game was fully released and that all major bugs were eliminated. The Gamescom 2017 event demonstrated the issues surrounding the logistics of running a large "Battlegrounds" tournament with a large number of players involved, and they had worked alongside ESL to explore how to do this effectively in the future. Further, Green stated there was also the need to establish a format for presenting a "Battlegrounds" match to make it interesting to spectators, which he thought would take some time to develop given the nature of the emergent gameplay, comparing it to established first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arena esport games. A 20-team, 80-player tournament produced by Intel took place in Oakland in November 2017, with a prize pool of 200,000.