How Many People Are Playing Fortnite Now?

Fortnite sure came out of nowhere, didn't it? At the beginning, it had all the telltale signs of a title that might not take off. Now — thanks to its battle royale mode — it's pulling in millions of dollars per day, and tens of millions of players are logging in each month to join the fun.

But can we get a little more specific than, say, tens of millions of players? Are there more concrete numbers out there? How many people are playing Fortnite now?

The best we can do at this point in time is look to a blog post from Epic Games, which was published back in September 2018. In it, Epic claims that the previous month — August 2018 — was Fortnite's biggest so far, with 78.3 million players signing in to participate in the game's various modes. That's no tiny figure; the population of Thailand, for instance, consists of 69.3 million people. So imagine every single person in that country signing in at least once per month to play Fortnite, along with 9 million friends from other locations. That's a lot of people.

Is it possible that number's gone up since then? Of course. But you have to keep in mind that several new battle royale shooters have entered the arena since. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 introduced its Blackout mode in Fall 2018 after those numbers were announced. And early 2019 saw the launch of Apex Legends, a game from Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment. It's just as likely those games have eaten into Fortnite's audience, and if Fortnite's numbers had gone up since last year, Epic Games probably would've let us know about it.

So we really can't say where Fortnite sits in terms of its current player count. All we can do is make an educated guess, and if we had to do that, we'd say that Fortnite is still in the ballpark of 78.3 million players.