The return of Fortnite's original map brings a record-setting 6M concurrent players to the battle royale island

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It's more players than Fortnite had at its peak as a cultural phenomenon.

Fortnite has set a new all-time concurrent player record, with tracker fortnite.gg reporting 6.1 million concurrent players as the game's all-time peak yesterday, November 4 2023. That new total of 6,172,463 people online at once might be chalked up to the Fortnite Chapter 4 release, Fortnite OG, which brings back the original island and weapons, along with some early gadgets, from the heady days of Fortnite's 2018 success. As of press time, Fortnite is holding at just over 5.5 million players.

Fortnite's OG season does clearly hold a lot of positive memories, then. The main mode, Battle Royale, peaked at 3.1 million players yesterday. There were also nearly a million people playing Ranked Battle Royale and Zero Build Battle Royale modes, respectively. So lots of desire for that original, unranked Fortnite experience, but more than a little curiosity for what could have been—the game definitely didn't have a ranked mode back in 2018.

"It's a little funny to think that nostalgia for just five years ago is causing a resurgence in Fortnite's popularity, but I don't think it's unreasonable. Fortnite's audience skews younger, and five years is an eternity for a kid (and a lot of people, kids or not, would say that these particular past five years have felt very long)," said PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde when Fortnite shot to the top of Twitch on Friday.

That success for Fortnite was accompanied by a commensurate bump in viewers for Fortnite's first big personality, streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins. Ninja capitalized on the sudden trend by streaming Fortnite OG for over 40 hours in the past few days.

The popularity was enough that the official Fortnite Status account posted a warning to players about the possibility of short queues to log in.

"We’re continuing to monitor server health and capacity following the launch of the Fortnite OG season, and players may find they experience a short queue before logging in," it said.

Jonathan Bolding
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.