The ‘Fortnite’ World Cup Finals Drew More Than 2 Million Concurrent Viewers

The inaugural Fortnite World Cup Finals pulled some of esports’ biggest names — including gaming collective FaZe Clan, Ninja, and DrLupo — to New York City this past weekend to compete for esports’ largest grand prize cash payout ever: $3 million.

And the person who won that $3 million wasn’t any of the aforementioned top players. It was 16-year-old Kyle Giersdorf, aka ‘Bugha,’ who you may know from that time he won one of Keemstar and MrBeast’s Friday Fortnite tournaments.

Giersdorf won the event in front of a packed house at Arthur Ashe Stadium — but though the stadium holds a whopping 23,771 people, that’s a small number compared to the total audience who tuned in to see him and other competitors try to outshoot, outbuild, and outlast one another.

Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, teamed up with YouTube to officially livestream the event, offering in-game items to people who linked up their Fortnite and YouTube accounts and tuned in to watch the three-day World Cup. Between YouTube and Twitch, where it was also officially streamed, the World Cup topped out at more than 2 million concurrent viewers, Variety reports, citing data from esports expert Rod Breslau. (An Epic Games representative said the company’s official viewership tally is still in progress.)

We already knew that Fortnite brings in massive viewership online. Livestreams of it are consistently the most watched content on both YouTube and Twitch. But with the first World Cup, Fortnite took that digital success and brought it offline, where it filled the stadium with real-life challenges (which players complete daily to earn experience or as part of the game’s themed seasons to earn items), food from Fortnite’s in-game restaurants, and mascots dressed as its most popular characters.

There’s no doubt that by signing deals with platforms like YouTube and splashing out cash — the total prize pool was $30 million, with each of its 200 finalists guaranteed a prize of at least $50,000 — Fortnite is hoping to beat out the kind of viewership live streams of previous top esports championships generated…like in 2017, when a tournament for battle arena game Dota 2 drew 5 million concurrent viewers.

The game, which has more than 250 million players, is riding this weekend’s fervor by sharing cryptic tweets looking ahead to its much-anticipated tenth season.