Epic Games, creator of Fortnite: Battle Royale; has recently announced a staggering prize pool of $100 million for Fortnite tournaments in its very first year. The number 100 million is self-sufficient to understand how big Fortnite is these days.
Although, many might not consider Fortnite to be an eSports quality game but, it definitely conquering the console and PC gaming market. It’s also an indication of how crazy people are for the Battle-Royale themed games. The game was released back in September 2017 as an early access and recently launched for iOS in April 2018.
Fortnite Battle Royale revolves around “Survival by construction” element and is quite popular with the celebrities and athletes who claim to play Fortnite. The game was received overwhelmingly on its launch. Well, how overwhelmingly you ask? Hmm. 10 million players to be exact in its initial 2 weeks of release. That’s quite a start eh!
Also Read: PUBG Mobile vs Fortnite: Which Game is Better For You?
Popularity
The game is extremely popular among streamers. In March 2018, Tyler Blevins hosted a stream that included Drake, Travis Scott, Kim DotCom, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster all playing the game. The stream broke over 635,000 concurrent viewers, making it the highest-watched stream on Twitch outside of eSports tournaments. As a result, Epic Games announced plans for a Fortnite Battle Royale Celebrity Pro-am to be held during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018 in June, featuring 50 celebrities and 50 top players competing.
With all this hype surrounding the game, Epic Games have decided to fund Fortnite tournaments and a blog post on Epic Games developer site quoted “In the 2018 – 2019 season, Epic Games will provide $100,000,000 to fund prize pools for Fortnite competitions. We’re getting behind the competitive play in a big way, but our approach will be different – we plan to be more inclusive, and focused on the joy of playing and watching the game. Stay tuned for more details about competitive structures and eligible platforms in the weeks ahead.”
Competition
To be honest, other well-settled eSports games never had this much of funding to begin with. Only Dota2 would come close to $140 million funding since 2013 in 900 odd tournaments, while other eSports games like CSGO and LOL have received funding of just over $50 million since their introduction. This just goes to say Epic Games is making a crap ton of money and people are paying for cosmetics and in-game dance moves! If you do the math, Epic is making $1 million a day from iOS platform alone!!!!!!!
Lastly, Epic is planning to host an all-celebrity Fortnite tournament as mentioned earlier in LA at the E3 Convention with the hopes of kicking off strong and gaining more popularity on Twitch and YouTube platforms. Stay tuned for more gaming stuff like this!
