Written by, Mihajlo Trajcheski
Updated June, 22, 2023
Boasting over 270 million monthly players, Fortnite statistics from the UK, and global facts as well, show that Epic Games’ battle royale game tops the charts when it comes to popularity, tournament prizes and revenue.
Read on for more mind-blowing Fortnite stats!
When was Fortnite released?
How much money has Fortnite made?
How many active players does Fortnite have?
How many downloads does Fortnite have?
How much do people play Fortnite?
How many monthly players does Fortnite have?
When did Epic Games release the mobile version of Fortnite?
How much does Fortnite make a year?
What rating is Fortnite in the UK?
(Statista, ActivePlayer)
This free-to-play game has been a huge success since its launch in 2017. In just two weeks, the game recorded 10 million players and a whopping 125 million Fortnite active players in less than a year.
In 2020, the Fortnite player count reached 350 million players.
The number of users is still going strong—the latest May 2022 Fortnite stats show almost 270 million Fortnite monthly players registered on the gaming platform.
(LendEDU, GAME)
Judging by research from video game retailer GAME, Fortnite gamers have spent an equivalent of 10.4 million years playing the game, which roughly adds up to 2.083 billion days or about 310 days per player.
This also makes Fortnite the most played game, beating World of Warcraft, Overwatch and GTA5 to the top.
Interested in World of Warcraft and similar MMORPGs? Take a look at this list.
A 2020 survey of 1,000 US Fortnite gamers further reveals that only 29.4% play the game 5 hours a week, spending the least amount of time.
The majority of respondents (32.5%), on the other hand, stated they play Fortnite anywhere from 6 to 10 hours a week, whereas 7.7% (the smallest share of interviewees) said they play 21 hours per week, sometimes even more.
(The Verge)
Finishing off Fortnite’s Marvel-themed season, the Galactus event held in November 2020, garnered an incredible 15.3 million concurrent players.
This broke the previous record set six months earlier when Travis Scott’s concert recorded 12.3 million Fortnite concurrent players during the first showing.
The record for the most-watched live event before that was held by another concert, this time by DJ Marshmello in February 2019, which had 10.7 million concurrents.
(Statista, The Verge)
The device most commonly used for people to play Fortnite is the Playstation 4, chosen by 42.2% of users. This indicates that PS4 is more frequently used than Xbox One by 10%. 13.9% of players opted for PCs as their prefered gaming device, while only 8.7% of Fortnite users play the game on mobile phones.
These Fortnite statistics are confirmed by Epic Games as well. According to the company, PS4 generated 46.8% of Fortnite’s total revenue between March 2018 and July 2020. Xbox One followed shortly with 27.5% of revenue, while iOS devices ranked in 5th place, having only a 7% share of the total. The remaining 18.7% are split between Android, Nintendo Switch, and computers.
Now that Fortnite is available to play across all devices via Xbox Cloud Gaming, the share of PC and mobile is sure to pick up.
(Blockworks)
Epic Games received additional funding worth $1 billion from Sony Group Corporation and KIRKBI each to accelerate its metaverse ambitions. While many have considered Fortnite to be a ‘metaverse’ leader, much like Roblox and Minecraft, the game’s progress has stalled recently due to increased competition.
(PlayerCounter, Statista)
Based on Fortnite statistics by nationality, the US has 27.52% daily active participation, followed by Brazil with 8.08% and Russia with 5.50%. The UK falls in 4th place with 5.14% daily active participation and Germany ranks fifth with 4.78%.
In the US, Fortnite is most popular among the younger generations with almost 80% of players being aged between 18 and 34. More specifically, 62.7% are between the ages of 18 and 24 and another 22.5% are aged from 25 to 34.
(Statista)
Speaking of Fortnite and its popularity in the US, the battle-royal game is more popular among male players as 72.4% of Fortnite gamers are men, as opposed to 27.6% of female players.
This coincides with the number of gamers in the country, 58.5% of whom are male. Unsurprisingly, male gamers outnumber their female counterparts all over the world—in the UK, 70% of adult men play video games compared to 64% of women.
(Reboot Online Marketing)
Seen by the number of searches, Fortnite is very popular in Europe and North America, overshadowing one of its biggest rivals, Minecraft. In fact, in Europe, 26 countries out of 39 prefer Fortnite, making 7,746,500 searches for the game as opposed to 5,165,500 for Minecraft. This stat is not that surprising seeing as how Minecraft has fewer players than Fortnite—there are 141 million registered Minecraft users as opposed to Fortnite’s 350 million.
(Pocket-lint)
Unlike Roblox, which is rated PEGI 7 in the UK, Fortnite has a PEGI 12 rating as it displays scenes of mild violence. This makes it unsuitable for younger generations as well as illegal for anyone under 12 to download or purchase. It also means Fortnite’s player base in the UK falls behind that of kid-friendly Roblox.
(Epic Games)
Fortnite has been making a lot of money for Epic Games ever since its release in 2017, generating over $9 billion in revenue in the first two years alone.
Even though a revenue fall to $3.6 billion was expected in 2020, the game generated over $5.1bn, as confirmed by Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney.
Epic Games, one of the biggest video game companies in the world, makes most of its revenue from Fortnite—other revenue streams like the Epic Game Store made only $235 million between 2018 and 2019 while its engine raked in $221 million during the same period.
(Sensor Tower)
Fortnite picked up more than $1.2 billion in revenue since its release on the App Store in 2018 and another $9.7 million from the Google Store in 2020.
In terms of downloads, Fortnite was installed around 144 million times, with the Apple store having approximately 133 million downloads and Google Play 11 million. Although impressive, Roblox outperforms in this category by being downloaded a total of 383 million times on iOS and Android devices.
(LendEDU)
Based on a survey of Fortnite US players and their spending habits, 68.8% of players have spent money on in-game purchases, with obtaining new characters being the costliest purchase (58.9% of average spending). The least expensive portion is represented by emotes, which make up only 9.52% of the entire cost.
And it’s not just veteran Fortnite players that are dishing out money on the free-to-play game as 36.78% said they had never bought in-game purchases before.
The survey also concluded that 80.09% of Fortnite spenders were aware that the in-game purchases didn’t give any additional advantages in the game, but spent the money just the same.
(LendEDU)
Even though Twitch, the leading streaming service in the world, is free, there is a chance to subscribe to select channels, which 25.3% of Fortnite players in the US do.
Nearly half of them pay between 5 and 10 dollars per subscription (41.11% pay $4.99 and 43.48 per cent pay $9.99), while a smaller share of 15.41% pay $24.99 a month.
(Esports Charts, PCGamesN)
The Fortnite World Cup Solo and Duos Finals in 2019 recorded a total of 22.5 million hours of watch-time, with peak viewership at 2.33 million, making it the most viewed Fortnite tournament of all time. Just for comparison, UFC, one of the most viewed sports of all time, has a similar number of TV viewers.
What’s more, it is reported that the three-day finals, held at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, were attended in person by more than 19,000 fans.
(Esports Earnings, Statista)
So far, Fortnite has held 711 professional tournaments with a total of $121 million in prize money awarded.
The ranking for the largest prize pools in Fortnite is as follows:
(Esports Earnings)
Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf was the winner of the first Fortnite World Cup, taking home the $3 million prize. He is still the highest-earning Fortnite gamer in the world, getting a total of $3.36 million from playing the game.
The other professional gamers that round off the top players with the highest Fortnite earnings include:
(Business of Apps, Statista)
Generating 127 million hours of watch time in February 2021 across major streaming platforms, Fortnite is the most popular battle royal game among streamers.
According to Business of Apps, 389 million hours of Fortnite content were watched across Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming in the first quarter of 2021, down from the 385 million hours reported the previous quarter.
Did you know that 15% of adults in the UK watch gaming videos on YouTube?
(TwitchTracker)
Almost 2.28 million viewers were logged in at the same time on the platform, breaking the previous record set in October 2019 when 1.69 million concurrent viewers were reported.
(TwitchTracker)
The latest Twitch stats show that in May 2022, the game had an average of 73.5k viewers who watched 122 million hours of content on the platform. Although the number of average concurrent viewers went down by 25.7%, the amount of watch-time actually increased by 26.1%.
(Twitch Tracker, YouTube, NME)
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is the most popular Fortnite content creator on Twitch having amassed a whopping 18.2 million followers.
According to the most recent Fortnite player stats, he is followed by:
Ninja is also the biggest Fortnite YouTuber with 23.9 million subscribers, followed by Ali-A, one of the most popular British YouTuber gamers who also has the fastest-growing channel on the platform.
Ali-A has 17.6 million followers on YouTube and over 5 million views. He is also the latest Fortnite content creator to get a collection of Fortnite skins and items as part of the Icon Series.
Fortnite has experienced incredible market growth, growing its player base to 350 million users in just three years. It is also a free-to-play game that has managed to make $9 billion in revenue in two years, $1.2 billion of which came from mobile devices alone. Whether you play or not, there is no denying the game reigns supreme among gamers and according to Fortnite statistics (UK and global) will likely only grow in popularity in time.
As someone who grew up gaming and always had a love for random facts, being able to write about gaming and technology for a living has been an absolute treat. Whenever I’m not researching my next topic for Don’t Disappoint Me, I am deflecting the attacks of Bosses in Sekiro, investigating a murder in Disco Elysium, helping Zagreus escape the underworld in Hades, or flanking enemies in Call of Duty with my squad. Having studied English language and literature has helped me merge these two worlds of random facts and gaming into a fulfilling career.