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 Battle Royale
"Fortnite" had first been revealed by Epic Games in 2011, considered to be a combination of "Minecraft" and "Left 4 Dead" as four players would work together to scavenge resources to built fortifications, traps, weapons, and other objects to survive monster attacks. The game ended up with a protracted development period, in part due to both external pressures, with the industry transitioning to a games as a service model, and internal shifts of focus within Epic (including focusing attention on their first free-to-play title "Paragon") to meet the external challenges. During this period, Epic made a deal with Tencent, giving them about 40% of the company in exchange for their support for the games as a service approach as well as ready access to the Chinese video game market. "Fortnite" was confirmed to have a planned 2018 release in June 2017, with a paid early access period starting a month later; the game is planned otherwise as a free-to-play title supported by microtransactions. With release in early access, the game featured its primary gameplay mode, "Save the World", where players in teams up to four would work cooperatively to survive and complete objectives on randomly generated maps.