PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’s meteoric rise appears to be coming to an end in favor of Fortnite. Fortnite on Twitch has seen its viewership and play time go way up, twice as much as Battlegrounds has. It’s likely that this is for a variety of reasons, which is surprising considering the mode’s origins.
Fortnite originally started its Battle Royale game mode to capitalize on the sudden popularity of the Battle Royale genre for what was a positively reviewed but quickly forgotten game. In that time, Fortnite has become a big rival of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, with its own battle royale mode being just as popular, and now even more so.
It’s likely that the increase in traffic for Fortnite on Twitch is because Fortnite’s developers are much more on-the-ball about the game, such as waiting to put the mode in until the game was actually released and the game was in a stable state (unlike PUBG which put out a “full release” when the game still has a lot of bugs), regular content updates (including a jetpack) and not having nearly as bad of a cheating problem as Battlegrounds, which is seeing a sharp drop in players from Chinese hackers that have been ruining many a game since the game was released in that country.
While Bluehole has separated Chinese servers into their own section in order to prevent them from getting into other games, it might be too little too late in many cases. Fortnite’s greater weapon variety and less-serious atmosphere is also likely a cause.
Either way, Fortnite on Twitch is likely to keep all of that traffic as long as they can keep people interested and continue to update the game. Whether PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds can regain lost ground remains to be seen; it mainly relies on the developers being able to fix the game’s many issues.
