Fortnite drew in an audience of 10.7 million people across all gaming platforms with its recent Marshmello concert, according to developer Epic Games.
This easily tops the previous record of 8.3 million concurrent players during Fortnite’s in-game butterfly event in November.
“Fortnite recently had two record highs for peak concurrent players,” Epic told The Verge in a statement. “On February 2nd, Fortnite had its best event day ever with 10.7 million players showing up for the Marshmello concert. Additionally, this past weekend on Saturday, February 16th, the game saw its best non-event day ever with 7.6 million players in the game concurrently.”
What’s even more notable about the 10-minute Marshmello concert is the fact that it was such an unorthodox type of gaming event. In a game made popular for its battle royale combat — where up to 100 players fight to eliminate one another — it’s particularly impressive that its biggest audience ever turned up for a non-violent music show. Epic even disabled weapons to ensure that players could focus on Marshmello’s whole performance.
Not even Avengers: Infinity War‘s Thanos, the villain of one of the biggest movies of all-time, could generate as large of a crowd in Fortnite. Similarly, last year’s rollouts of Fortnite to the Switch and Android devices, respectively, didn’t even manage to create such a large spike in players.
As noted by The Verge, Epic is only reporting the number of people who checked out the concert in-game. Therefore, there are certainly many more people who tuned in through external platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Source: The Verge
