Credit: Turner “Tfue” Tenney
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Fortnite 
saw its highest Twitch
viewership of last week on Sunday as high-profile influencers such as Turner “Tfue” Tenney streamed their efforts to qualify for the duos portion of the upcoming World Cup in July.
The day’s 3.9M hours watched outperformed Friday where the return of Daniel “Keemstar” Keem’s Friday Fortnite tournament helped the game record 3.3M hours watched.
Maybe the most noticeable effect that Friday Fortnite and the World Cup qualifiers had was at the top of Twitch with influencers such as Tenney and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. As was the case with the last duos qualifier two weeks ago, Blevins opted to stream on Saturday but then chose to take his efforts offline to focus on competition Sunday.
While he didn’t manage to earn a bid, Blevins’ stream for the semi-final on Saturday averaged 52K CCV peaking at 73K. Tenney, on the other hand, streamed both Saturday and Sunday averaging 81K CCV Saturday with a max of 130K.
It was Tenney’s Sunday stream that won the weekend, though. After Tenney wasn’t able to compete in Friday Fortnite, Blevins managed to produce one of his best streams of the year as he finished in third place in the double-elimination tournament. However, Tenney came back Sunday with a 4.5-hour stream of his own that racked up an impressive average of 187K CCV, peaking at 300K. Both figures were the best for a single session by Tenney so far this year, or ever for that matter.
Overall, Fortnite may have produced its fifth most-watched day on Twitch since the beginning of April for the World Cup qualifier on Sunday, but the main channel for esports coverage still lagged behind the top personal streams.
The Fortnite channel’s 346K hours watched had an average of 18K CCV and only peaked at 39K. Sunday’s coverage was perhaps the highlight of the weekend with 216K hours watched, but it wasn’t much better than the channel has produced the past few weeks.
With the World Cup coming up soon, it’s yet to be seen how exactly Epic Games
plans to handle coverage. Despite pouring resources into providing a professional-style broadcast to qualifiers, it has become evident that fans prefer to spectate Fortnite esports from the perspective of their favorite players, or the most popular player participating like Tenney and Blevins.
Meanwhile, the presence of Friday Fortnite seems to have no real negative or positive effect on the viewership of World Cup qualifiers. While players like Blevins can attract massive boosts in viewership from playing in Keem’s tournament, it’s still possible for top streamers like Tenney to come back just a day or two later and record his best stream of the year in terms of average and peak viewership.
