Fortnite had 3.4M users on Sunday before it crashed, Epic says

Epic Games says that Fortnite, the early access title that blends building with first- and third-person combat, hit a new high player count over the weekend. More than 3.4 million players logged in on Sunday, causing a half-dozen “partial and total service disruptions.”

Many of those players were, no doubt, enjoying the game’s free-to-play battle royale mode. Called Fortnite: Battle Royale, that mode exists within the main game’s client and is available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Epic did not disclose how many of those 3.4 million users paid full price for the base game and how many are playing battle royale-style for free. They did say that the game is growing “far beyond our wildest growth expectations.”

Much has been made of the competition between PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the game that arguably first elevated the battle royale genre into the public consciousness, even though Fortnite’s battle royale mode is a markedly different experience. Nevertheless, it seems like Fortnite is doing a bit of humble bragging here. Battlegrounds may have sold something like 30 million copies on Steam, but the most players it’s ever had concurrently on that platform is 3.2 million, give or take.

The news comes just a little more than a week after Epic announced it would shut down its MOBA, Paragon, and transition that team over to work on Fortnite. Paragon never made it out of beta, and every player was issued a refund for money they spent in the game.