Fortnite has exploded in popularity—growing larger than ever—thanks in large part to the well-received OG Season and recent updates that added games like Lego Fortnite into Epic’s free-to-play shooter. Now data shows players on Xbox and PlayStation have spent more hours in Fortnite than Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox, EA Sports FC 24, and Call of Duty combined.
For the last two months, Fortnite has been on a steady incline in popularity. In November, the return of the original battle royale map as well as classic guns led to Fortnite’s highest number of players in a single day in the game’s six-year history. After that, in December, Epic added three games to Fortnite: Lego Fortnite, Fortnite Festival, and Rocket Racing. Anecdotally, my friend list on Xbox and PlayStation is now playing mostly Fortnite—and these are people who barely or never played before. And new data from Ampere Analysis indicates that Fortnite is indeed dominating on consoles.
As spotted by VGC, Ampere Analysis released a report on January 11 showing that in November 2023, the total hours spent in Fortnite increased by nearly 150 percent. In December hours played grew an additional 9 percent.
According to Ampere, console gamers on Xbox and PlayStation spent more time in Fortnite than in Roblox, GTA V, GTA Online, EA Sports FC 24, and Call of Duty HQ which includes Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Warzone. All total, console players spent more than 1.6 billion hours playing Fortnite in November 2023.
All of this momentum helped push Epic to become the leading publisher by monthly active users across Xbox and Playstation, surpassing usual leader EA and other companies like Ubisoft and Activision.
While Ampere expects many of these new or returning players to lose interest eventually and for Fortnite’s stats to normalize a bit, it does point out that Epic has confirmed another OG season is coming in 2024. That could lead to another huge bump in players. And it’s likely that Epic has plans to bring more games, like Lego Fortnite, to its popular battle royale in the future. So it’s possible that Fortnite might grow even larger by the end of this year. Which is almost hard to imagine, honestly.
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