Fortnite Made More Money, Had More Viewers Than PUBG In February On PC - Report

Fortnite is eating away at PUBG, it seems. Research company SuperData has released a report that claims Fortnite is bigger these days than the game that inspired it in terms of viewers and revenue.

In the last week of February, Fortnite had 14 million unique viewers on Twitch (this was before the Drake-Ninja mega-stream), while PUBG had 8.7 million at the time, according to the report. By comparison, PUBG was leading during the last week of January, when it had 8.5 million unique viewers compared to 6.1 million for Fortnite.

In terms of revenue, SuperData's calculations say Fortnite made $126 million during February on PC, while PUBG pulled in $103 million. It is unclear how SuperData collected its data. Fortnite's Save the World mode starts at $40, while its Battle Royale mode--the one that is no doubt significantly more popular--is free. Battle Royale makes money from add-ons virtual currency that you can use to buy cosmetics or the seasonal battle passes. PUBG, meanwhile, costs $30 upfront and also allows you to spend money on various extras. Thus, any comparison between the two popular games would never be perfect.

According to SuperData, Fortnite is more popular than PUBG right now because it is more accessible due in part to its business model (free) and its cartoon-style visuals. Working against PUBG, the firm said, is that cheating is still a problem, which has reportedly pushed the developer to allocate resources to address those problems.

Looking ahead, SuperData predicted that the Battle Royale genre will only get more popular, with further competition in the space. Some of gaming's biggest publishers might get involved, SuperData speculated. For what it's worth, Call of Duty publisher Activision is reportedly tracking the battle royale genre, while Red Dead Redemption parent publisher Take-Two is doing the same.

Even if Fortnite is growing in popularity and competition is ramping up, that doesn't mean PUBG is in danger of falling off the map anytime soon. After all, it is popular on a level never seen before in gaming. The game had more than 2.4 million concurrent players on Steam today, according to Valve's public data. While that is down from its peak, it is still almost four times as many players as the second most-popular game on Steam, CS: GO (528,000 peak concurrent users today).

Fortnite and PUBG are also on console, as well as mobile devices, though SuperData's report only covers PC.