Here's how many people play Fortnite

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Fortnite player count numbers are rarely officially revealed by Epic, but the recent OG launch has smashed records. Fortnite Season OG is essentially a limited-time event to cap off Season 4 that has brought back the Chapter 1 Season 5 map. That means classic areas like Tilted Towers, Pleasant Park, and Risky Reels are all back in the game, and players have arrived in their millions to get in on the nostalgia.

Fortnite hit a new peak of 44 million players in one day thanks to the event, though there are several ways you can measure and interpret player counts, whether it's registered players, concurrent players and so on. Below we've broken down plenty of records and numbers about the Fortnite player count to give you an idea of how many players are still hopping into the battle royale game.

How many people play Fortnite?

The concurrent Fortnite player count obviously fluctuates a fair bit but, at the time of writing, has recently been anywhere between 1 million and 2 million active players at a time - that's according to unofficial site Fortnite.gg. Though interest waxes and wanes with each new update and season, so these numbers can still vary a lot.

However, Epic Games revealed that the launch of Fortnite OG brought in a new record for the game, with 44.7 million players logging in across November 5, 2023, to play the new-old Fornite map. All these players racked up 102 million hours of playing.

Way to start things off with a big bang 💥We're blown away by the response to #FortniteOG. Yesterday was the biggest day in Fortnite’s history with over 44.7 MILLION players jumping in and 102 MILLION hours of play.To all Fortnite players, OG and new, THANK YOU!November 5, 2023

This smashes the previous player count record seen for Travis Scott's Astronomical in-game concert in April, 2020. Over 12.3 million players participated in the concert.

Over 12.3 million concurrent players participated live in Travis Scott's Astronomical, an all-time record! Catch an encore performance before the tour ends: https://t.co/D7cfd2VxccApril 24, 2020

Fortnite.gg estimates that the game saw an all-time concurrent player peak of around 6.2 million players at once on November 5, 2023, thanks to this OG event. However, Epic previously said that they saw a concurrent player record of 15.3 million players for the December 2020 end-of-season live event, which saw players teaming up with Iron Man, Wolverine, and other Marvel heroes to defeat Galactus.

We defeated him! A record 15.3 million concurrent players joined forces in our biggest event ever to fight back Galactus in today's in-game event, while more than 3.4 million cheered and watched on @YouTubeGaming and @Twitch! pic.twitter.com/IAcNpcPKEwDecember 2, 2020

Epic rarely posts official stats and numbers unless there's a major milestone to celebrate, but we know that in 2020 Fortnite had around 80 million active monthly players, and in 2021 that increased to 83 million.

Then there's the number of registered players. That's a tally of all the Fortnite accounts that exists. It doesn't represent the active player count though, as it counts people that signed up and never play too. It's not a great way to see how many people are playing Fortnite because it's obviously always going to go up. However, in March 2019 there were 250 million registered players and in May 2020 that number jumped to 350 million:

Fortnite now has over 350 million registered players! In April, players spent over 3.2 billion hours in game. 🙌🥳Let’s keep the party going with our Party Royale Premiere LIVE on May 8 at 9PM ET featuring @DillonFrancis @steveaoki @deadmau5: https://t.co/H18c3UgBL1 pic.twitter.com/Cgt3r7LXQOMay 6, 2020

One thing that's harder to work out is how Fortnite stacks up against other games. Because so many of these stats are cherry picked from super successful moments and are not frequently updated, it's hard to compare things directly. You can sort of guesstimate things though.

For comparison, Apex Legends boasted '70 million players' in Oct 2019 and regularly has hundreds of thousands of concurrent players on Steam. The previous BR king, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, hit a 400 million player peak in June 2018, and 3.24 million concurrents in January 2018.

It's clear that even after five years, Fortnite is quite comfortably the biggest battle royale out there, but who knows if something else entirely can dethrone it.