Fortnite's OG season fuels 'biggest day in game's history'

Publish date: 2024-07-14

By Tom RichardsonBBC Newsbeat

EPIC A line-up of four characters from Fortnite against a sky-blue background. On the left, a humanoid banana with chocolate buttons for eyes and ice cream sprinkles for eyebrows wears a jacket that resembles a waffle ice cream cone. It's wearing a circular badge with "Lil Split" written on it. Next to the banana, a character with a silver-grey suit of armour and a golden-helmet with glowing blue eyes stands. Next to that character is another wearing black armour with silver ridges on the shoulders and neon blue decals. He's wearing a helmet styled after a ram or goat's skull with sharp fangs. And finally, on the right, a female character wears a leather cat-suit style get up. She's got heavily tattooed arms, and a leather pilot's helmet with cat ears protruding out of the top.EPICFortnite puts up to 100 players against each other in a fight to be the last one standing

Fortnite's makers say the game had the biggest day in its history over the weekend.

The battle royale blaster regularly changes up its arenas and has transported players back to its original island setting for its latest.

Publisher Epic Games says 44.7 million players logged a total 102 million hours of play in new season Fortnite OG on Saturday.

That's despite some people struggling to log in or getting stuck in queues.

Fortnite, first launched in 2017, puts up to 100 players against each other in a fight to be the last one standing.

The game is currently in its fourth chapter, split up into shorter seasons, with each new one bringing changes and new features.

Fortnite OG will bring back fan-favourite locations and weapons, but retain some of the updated game mechanics added in later seasons.

One thing that isn't returning for now is challenges - a popular scavenger hunt-style feature of old-school Fortnite that boosted player numbers when it updated on a Tuesday.

The new season launched on Friday, and appeared to be an instant hit with fans.

According to unofficial stats site Fortnite.gg, the game recorded 6.2 million concurrent players - an all-time high - on Saturday.

And it even boosted the number of people watching Fortnite on streaming site Twitch, according to viewing tracker SullyGnome.

Epic tweeted on Saturday to say it was monitoring its servers due to the high demand, and warned players to expect queues before joining a match.

Despite the success of Fortnite's latest update, Epic recently announced mass layoffs, with company boss Tim Sweeney saying the company had been "spending more than it earned".

It's not the only games company to lose lots of workers despite a bumper year for great games - Halo and Destiny developer Bungie is the most recent high-profile name to lay people off.

As well as owning Fortnite, Epic also runs its own online games store publishing titles from well-known developers.

It recently released highly-praised sequel Alan Wake 2, and created a special Fortnite map previewing that game.

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