Epic Games’ Fortnite surpassed 3.4 million concurrent players this past weekend, roughly six months since the game initially released into early access and just over four months since its significantly popular Battle Royale mode hit.
Fortnite, meanwhile, didn’t hold up so well to its 3 million-strong crowd. The servers buckled under the traffic, causing Epic to publish a detailed post postmortem covering the outages and what it plans to do to avoid similar issues in the past.
Curious developers can find a breakdown of the server issues, complete with detailed charts, over on the Epic Games blog, alongside a call for new devs to help tackle the root of the problem.
Though Epic didn’t break its weekend player surge down by game mode, it's safe to say that the bulk of the weekend crowd was logging into to the dev’s take on the Battle Royale genre, especially considering the game mode’s past performance.
For comparison’s sake, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the game that put Battle Royale games on the map, crossed 3 million concurrent players on Steam roughly nine months after release. There are, of course, a few notable differences between the two leading Battle Royale titles including price and platform (Fortnite: Battle Royale is free to play and launched simultaneously on PS4, Xbox One, and PC), but the significance of Fortnite’s achievement is still one of note.