Fortnite has smashed PUBG’s record for concurrent players

Epic Games’ Fortnite notched up an earth-shattering 3.4 million concurrent players over the weekend, breaking the previous record held by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. 

By comparison, PUBG Corp’s every-man-for-himself shooter previously attracted an equally impressive 3.2 million concurrent players on Steam. Still, it wasn’t the easiest of rides for Epic Games, with the milestone weekend dogged by server downtime.

‘The extreme load caused 6 different incidents between Saturday and Sunday, with a mix of partial and total service disruptions to Fortnite,’ said the developer. There’s a whole lot more waffling in the post if you fancy reading it, although in laymen’s terms, the gist of the matter is clear: ‘When 3.4 million clients are connected at the same time these inefficiencies add up quickly.’

‘It’s been an amazing and exhilarating experience to grow Fortnite from our previous peak of 60K concurrent players to 3.4M in just a few months, making it perhaps the biggest PC/console game in the world!” Epic continued. ‘All of this has been accomplished in just a few months by a small team of veteran online developers — and we’d love to welcome a few more folks like yourself to join Epic Games on this journey!’

The developer recently confirmed a number of details on its plans for Valentine’s Day, including the release of update 2.4.2, which adds a brand new weapon and various themed goodies.