The competition is getting tighter in the battle royale market not only for players but for games as well as "Fortnite: Battle Royale," the primary competitor of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" or "PUBG," has now surpassed the latter.
This is a new milestone for the free-to-play "Fortnite: Battle Royale" game, having reached 3.4 concurrent players over the previous weekend, surpassing "PUBG's" 3.2 million. This victory for "Fortnite" was short-lived, however, since their servers immediately crashed due to the immense surge of players logging in and out of the game repeatedly.
"The extreme load caused 6 different incidents between Saturday and Sunday, with a mix of partial and total service disruptions to Fortnite," according to Epic Games, the developer of "Fortnite: Battle Royale. Regardless though, it still surpassed "PUBG's" numbers, if only for a little bit, and this in itself is another milestone for the title since "PUBG" is the most prominent battle royale game and the one that popularized the genre.
Epic Games is now working on fixing the issues that may have caused the crash, some of which involved a rather deep technical know-how of servers and network issues. They have also asked for the help and patience of the players. Should the developer be able to fix the issues, then it might only be a matter of time before "Fortnite: Battle Royale" sustains its lead over "PUBG."
One of the factors that could have been responsible for the imminent upper hand of "Fortnite" was that it was free to play, whereas "PUBG" costs between $15 and $30 depending on where players live. There are some notable changes in each of the gameplays' mechanics, with "PUBG" being the more serious in tone, but the core formula remains the same in which 100 players are parachuted into a slowly imploding play zone where only one can survive and claim victory.
Another advantage of "Fortnite: Battle Royale" over "PUGB" is that it is readily available across the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (PS4), whereas the latter is primarily a PC game and has only just begun its expansion to Xbox One and eventually to PS4. Given these factors, only time will tell which battle royale game gets to come out on top.
