Fortnite is now the most watched game on Twitch, doubling PUBG's viewer count

Twitch viewers have watched more than 5,000 years worth of Fortnite in the past two weeks alone, making it the most popular game on the platform by a long shot. Epic's Battle Royale behemoth is now pulling in more viewers than League of Legends, in second place, and has double the viewers of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which was watched for the equivalent of 2,517 years over the same period.

Fortnite's growth on Twitch is staggering: throughout December, around 2,000 channels were streaming the game to 40,000 viewers, on average. Now, 6,500 channels are streaming it to nearly 150,000 viewers at any given time. Meanwhile, PUBG has gone the other way, with a slight dip in both viewers and channels over the same period. Currently, it's averaging 4,000 channels and 65,000 viewers (less viewers than both League of Legends and CS:GO).

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It's not all that surprising, and mimics the games' respective numbers of concurrent players. PUBG's player count has fallen from its peak of more than 3 million in January to a steady 2.7 million, which is still massive, but Fortnite has leapfrogged it my pulling in more than 3.4 million players at a time.

PUBG is undoubtedly fun to watch, but perhaps Fortnite's quicker rounds and over-the-top action is helping it win a bigger audience. You can't backflip onto a moving rocket in PUBG, or quickscope from the back of that rocket (that second one is crazy).

All the data comes from SullyGnome, a Twitch stat tracker. You can dig into plenty of detail by playing around with all the tabs here. Interestingly, League of Legends has a much better ratio of viewers vs channels streaming the game. Fortnite only pulls in around 20 viewers per channel compared to 50 per channel for League, partly because of the sheer volume of people streaming Fortnite at any one time.

We don't know the breakdown between people watching Fortnite's two game modes, but its safe to say that it's the Battle Royale mode that is keeping viewers, and streamers, coming back.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.