Fortnite is Call of Duty’s latest, greatest threat

You’ve heard of Fortnite: Battle Royale. It’s a safe assumption to make at this point. After all, musician (and walking meme) Drake just played the last-player-standing shooter for 630,000 simultaneous viewers on the livestreaming video site Twitch last night. That’s a new record for the size of a concurrent audience on Amazon’s broadcasting platform, and the social media event skyrocketed Drake and Ninja to the top of Twitter’s hottest trends worldwide in the early hours of this morning. And I think these are all signs that Fortnite is turning into the game that may finally cause real troubles for Call of Duty.

“Popular” doesn’t begin to describe Fortnite. Sure, you could use numbers. It hit 3.4 million concurrent players in February, but that number is not much more than a brilliant marketing gimmick. Unlike the well-publicized concurrent numbers for games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Dota 2, Fortnite’s numbers include both PC and console and come from Epic instead of Valve’s publicly available data. Fortnite isn’t even on Steam, so Epic’s number is not a meaningful comparison even if it’s one that people repeat constantly (again, Epic’s marketing team better get paid for the work they’ve done here).