Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is the big dog in the battle royale fight, but Fortnite is quickly making up ground. Epic Games reported today that the game now has 40 million players, and that its peak concurrent user count recently broke the two million mark.
It's not as easy keeping up with Fortnite's numbers as it is with most other games, because it's not on Steam and so we can't just hit the numbers whenever we feel like it to see how things are going. And there are some caveats that come into play when lining it up against PUBG: Epic doesn't reveal how those numbers break down between the sandbox and battle royale modes, PUBG isn't available on the PS4, and Fortnite is free, which never hurts when it comes to pumping up the player count. But even though it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, it is an undeniably remarkable achievement for a battle royale mode that's been around for less than four months.
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We took an up-close look at the major Fortnite Battle Royale map update that's coming later this week, which will feature the addition of five named locations in the western half of the map including the biggest town in the game so far, and a series of mine shafts designed for close-quarters combat. It's big, which is good because it's also very likely the only map we'll be playing on for quite a while to come—when asked about the possibility of a second map coming to the game, level designer Sidney Rauchberger told us, "We don't have any concrete plans yet, but we're definitely open to the idea."
