Fortnite, a Battle Royale video game has been sweeping the nation and gaining extreme relevance for the last year and a half, but finally, after 19 months of insane success, Fortnite is declining.
The primary concern for Fortnite is its Twitch viewings. Twitch is a website where one can go to watch a live stream of somebody playing a video game. It’s a simple concept, but it’s gaming television and is, therefore, a pretty big deal, with hundreds of millions of unique viewers every year.
At its peak, Fortnite was the main attraction of Twitch. In July of last year, Fortnite had over two hundred thousand viewers. Eight months later we have a different landscape.
Last month, Fortnite reached lows in Twitch viewership that it hadn’t seen since January of last year. Along with the general viewership, Fortnite’s golden boy streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has taken a hit in relevancy as well.
Practically since the inception of Fortnite, Blevins was viewed by most as the number one Fortnite player, with only a few players considered to be on his level. Along with his esteem came popularity, and Blevins soon became extremely successful through Fortnite, making millions of dollars through the game.
However, since July, Ninja has had a sharp decrease in viewers. He’s experiencing a similar problem to Fortnite’s twitch viewership as a whole: He has reached his lowest follower statistics since one year ago.
Additionally, there is the actual number of people who play the game. While the number is still very large, in the hundred millions, but the point is that its player base is no longer growing as substantially as it once did. Fortnite went from 30 million players in January 2018, and skyrocketed to 125 million by June; however, that was it’s largest growth over a 6 month period. Far fewer players joining the game by January 2019. Fortnite has reached its peak; there’ s no room to go up, so it can only go down.
Harvard Westlake (HW) students echo the findings in these statistics. In a survey, eighty-eight percent of students agreed that Fortnite was dying. Of the many elaborations on their responses, a large number of students mentioned rival games that are pushing Fortnite down.
Respawn entertainment’s Apex Legends came up most frequently in the survey as substantial competition. It’s another Battle Royale game that launched last month, and it has already amassed a large following.
Like Fortnite, Apex is free. Its immediate success can probably be credited to the Battle Royale game craze, which ironically began with Fortnite. The difference between these two games is that their graphics and twist on the general “last man standing” concept are completely unique from each other.
Naturally, players are gravitating towards the newer game simply because it’s a much needed change from what they are used to.
In the end, what is happening to Fortnite is natural. In this modern age, it is inevitable that everything, from memes to songs to video games, lose relevance. This happens simply because there is constantly something newer and better. It is only shocking that Fortnite is dying because it was so big. It really was a ginormous thing, but no matter how huge its impact, its fading was inevitable; it’s the entertainment circle of life.
