Leaning on nostalgia is almost always a winning formula. Fortnite released its highly anticipated return to the original map over the weekend, and millions of players returned. The official Fortnite Twitter/X account wrote in a post yesterday that Fortnite had its biggest day ever, with over 44.7 million players in 24 hours.
Way to start things off with a big bang 💥
We're blown away by the response to #FortniteOG. Yesterday was the biggest day in Fortnite’s history with over 44.7 MILLION players jumping in and 102 MILLION hours of play.
We can narrow that down even further by taking a peek at the Fortnite.GG tracking website. A new all-time concurrent record of 6,172,463 players were jumping back into the original map. Here’s how the top 5 playlists looked during this massive surge of returning players:
Battle Royale – 3.1 million
Ranked Battle Royale – 981,000
Zero Build – 941,000
Ranked Zero Build – 97,000
Crazy Red vs Blue (team deathmatch mode) – 68,000
Even Fortnite’s original game mode pre-Battle Royale, Save The World, saw a boost in players as it hit a new all-time peak of 44,212 players. Fortnite originally launched on July 25, 2017 with the co-op Save The World mode. But Epic Games quickly pivoted and launched a Battle Royale mode on September 26, 2017 and the rest is history.
It’ll be fun to see how other developers and publishers digest what’s happening with Fortnite. Granted, Fortnite is a cultural phenomenon that most games can only dream of reaching. Still, I’m sure Activision is looking at it closely and is thinking about a return to its original map, Verdansk. Especially in light of the cool reception to Modern Warfare 3’s campaign.
As for Fortnite’s current OG season? That’s expected to last until December 2, when an event will usher in the start of the game’s next season. Will Epic consider leaving the original map as its own mode? I’m sure they are at least having conversations about it after this weekend. It’ll be interesting to see if this big spike in players carries over with a sustained higher concurrent peak compared to last month.
Last month, peak hours saw between about 1.5-2 million players every day.
