Fortnite Sets New Record Thanks to Nostalgic Season With Classic Map

Several years after its release, Fortnite has set a new activity record. The impressive number of players who launched Epic Games' title this weekend is thanks to the debut season, which brought back the iconic map from the game's early days.

Source: Epic Games.

After more than 6 years, the online shooter from Epic Games - Fortnite - is once again breaking records of popularity.

The developers of the game reported on X/Twitter that on Saturday, i.e., November 4, their title was launched by 44.7 million players, who spent a total of 102 million hours playing it.

According to an unofficial website analyzing data from the game's servers - Fornite.gg, at its hottest moment on November 4, more than six million people played Epic Games' hit simultaneously (to be precise: 6,172,463). More was recorded perhaps only on the occasion of the memorable Travis Scott concert in April 2020, when the result of 12.3 million concurrent players was achieved.

These numbers are impressive - especially if we compare them to other high-profile free-to-play online titles, such as CS 2 which was played in peak by a "mere" 1.81 million recipients (this took place on May 6, 2023).

Fortnite nostalgia

Why such enormous popularity? This is undoubtedly due to the new season, titled "OG" [short for Original - ed. note], which brought back to the game the map from the first months of the game's presence on the market, as well as a ton of old items.

It's a bit like a case of WoW Classic, where older players can feel at home, and younger players can finally understand what the former have in mind, when recalling their time interacting with the game with the words "those were the days".

Playing on nostalgia is nothing new in the game industry - in fact, for several years there has been a "boom" in all kinds of remakes i remasters. The path of Epic Games was followed by, among others, Modern Warfare 3, which, as part of a reboot, introduced to the online mode refreshed versions maps from the 2009 installment.