Fortnite Just Passed A Wild New Player Milestone

It's already been well established that Epic's battle royale game Fortnite is unthinkably popular, but a new player figure for the game puts its popularity into better perspective.

Following the game's recent release in South Korea, the Hunger Games-style battle royale game reached 8.3 million concurrent players worldwide. That's more than 8 million people playing the game at the same time. A spokesperson for Epic Games Korea provided the figure in an interview with Inven, and the number was confirmed by Epic Games to VG247.

In February this year, Fortnite had 3.4 million concurrent players, a figure so big that it caused the game's servers to struggle under the load. To put the new 8.3 million figure in perspective. Steam averages about 5 million concurrent players across all of its games, with a peak figure of 16 million people who simply have the Steam client open, according to SteamSpy data.

Competitor PUBG had around 797,000 peak concurrent players today, November 8, which is down from the game's peak of 3 million concurrent players.

In other Fortnite news, the game will add NFL jerseys to buy on November 9, while a new weapon--the Heavy Assault Rifle--is "coming soon" to the title. Epic hasn't announced when the new gun will be added, but it will presumably arrive as part of this week's Fortnite patch.

Fortnite's in-game universe has been under a lot of change lately, most notably with the major world-changing one-time event that took place in the game on November 4. At the end of the Halloween-themed Fortnitemares event, the mysterious purple cube that has been a fixture of the game since it first appeared toward the end of Season 5 exploded, sending players to a strange realm of light. It was awesome.