Fortnite Has Over 40 Million Monthly Active Users

Tencent reported its Q1 2018 earnings earlier today and inside of it came an interesting nugget of information. Tencent reported that the wildly successful battle royale game Fortnite now has "over 40 million monthly active users across PC and console". The reason this came out during Tencent's earnings report is because they're a big shareholder in Fortnite's developer, Epic Games (Tencent owns 40% of Epic). 40 million monthly active users is an incredible feat, especially since the game hasn't launched in China yet. While Fortnite isn't the most popular PC game in the world, it's slowly trying to get there. League of Legends currently holds that title with 100 million monthly active users.

League of Legends didn't get to 100 million monthly active users overnight though. In 2012 League of Legends boasted 32 million MAUs (monthly active users), then in 2014 it jumped to 67 million MAUs, and to over 100 million MAUs in 2016. Fortnite's only been out for a year and still has a lot of room to grow. Will it surpass League of Legends? Who knows. I think it has a good shot at it.

While Fortnite is thriving, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is slowly shedding users. Fortnite is already over twice as big as PUBG but it looks like that lead is set to grow as PUBG shrinks and Fortnite grows. According to Steamcharts, the game's 30 day average concurrent playerbase sits at ~984,000, down from 1.1m in April, and 1.3m in March, and 1.4m in February, and 1.6m in January. Neither Steam or Bluehole reports monthly active users, so an apples to apples comparison is difficult. I suspect one of the key reasons Fortnite managed to pull drastically ahead of PUBG is its free to play business model and much better optimizations. Time will tell if PUBG can return to growth, but for now, Fortnite reigns supreme as the king of battle royale.

Source: Tencent Q1 2018 (Page 3)