Fortnite The Discover tab, which allows you to choose between modes created by Epic Games like Battle Royale or experiences from non-Epic creators, now shows how many players are currently participating in a given experience. The change has been officially implemented. on Wednesdayand could be an important tool for creators to benchmark their work against Epic’s official modes.
You can view the player count in the game’s Discover tab, which represents the global number of players in the match at any given time, says Epic spokesman Dan Walsh. the edge. Based on what I saw, it’s overwhelmingly clear that Epic’s Battle Royale and Zero Build (the no-building Battle Royale introduced last year) are dramatically more popular than any experience created by non-Epic creators.
Just before I published this story, Battle Royale was around 343,000 players and Zero Build was around 255,000 players, but the highest count I could find for a non-epic experience was around 22,000 players. That experience was by far the exception; The posting in Discover’s “Popular” section had thousands of players, and many elsewhere in the catalog were only three or two digits long.
And the vast majority of game time in Epic’s own creations is consumed in the two Battle Royale modes. By my calculations, Battle Royales had just under 600,000 players when I did the count, while the rest of the experiences in the “By Epic” row totaled just over 108,000 players. It’s really no surprise that Battle Royales are the most popular, Epic tries really hard to keep them up to date, but now we have the numbers to prove it.
Until now, there were no public metrics to determine how many people were playing a creator-created island versus an Epic one, so these numbers will be important as creators try to figure out how they stack up in Epic’s new world. Economy of the creator 2.0” for Fortnite. Under the new system, Epic will pay 40 percent of Fortnite net income to creators based on commitment to their “islands” (Epic’s word for in-game experiences), but Epic will also receive money from that pool to cover game development costs.
The new metrics also put Epic on a more equal footing with Roblox, which also shows the number of players as you explore the available experiences. That allows us to make some interesting comparisons: when I checked Robloxthere were apparently around 449,000 people playing on the platform’s most popular experiences, Brookhaven P.R.which is about 116,000 more people than were playing Fortnite battle royale signature mode. I guess the player counts on the platforms aren’t quite an apples to apples comparison, but I think Brookhaven number still represents how big Roblox is.
(The number of players is not the only Roblox-as appearance in Fortniteby the way: Roblox also has a Discover tab, and roblox.com and fortnite.com they’re largely filled with rows of different experiences that you can learn more about right from those home pages).
I think Epic’s choice to increase transparency with player count is a good one. Epic has talked a lot about wanting to attract more creators to Fortnite, and this small change could make the platform feel more competitive. We’ll have to wait and see if the creators can actually make something that catches up with battle royale popularity, but at least we’ll be able to track that now.
