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Fortnite World Cup over the weekend produced the title’s best three days of viewership this year and its highest hours watched total for a single day since the grand finale of the Summer Skirmish event at PAX West last September.
The main Fortnite Channel led the way, posting its strongest days of viewership ever with four different 3-5 hour long sessions that averaged at least 136K concurrent viewers. The top duo and solo competition streams averaged 285K and 392K CCV, respectively, with the solo competition peaking at more than half a million viewers.
The opening day of World Cup action on Friday was dedicated to the “Creative” competition which pitted teams of four against one another in a variety of whacky Fortnite game modes, as well as a celebrity pro-am. While the creative competition didn’t emulate the traditional battle royale genre that Fortnite is known to fit into, the event was able to rack up 634K hours watched in the afternoon during east coast time, averaging 141K CCV.
The celebrity pro-am that followed produced less viewership than the competition that preceded it, but it was still able to accrue more than 500K hours watched with an average of 136K CCV.
Saturday and Sunday was when the more hyped action took place, though. Saturday’s duo’s competition posted 1.3M hours watched in less than 5 hours of airtime, averaging 285K CCV and peaking at just under 400K viewers.
Sunday’s solo competition was arguably the strongest performing session of the weekend with viewership peaking at 510K and an average of 392K across 4.6 hours of airtime. The World Cup’s final broadcast had a total hours watched mark of 1.8M.
The main Fortnite channel wasn’t the only way to view the action either. As Epic Games has done in the past, numerous high-profile influencers who were in attendance participating as contestants or commentators aired the channel’s broadcast on their personal channels as a co-stream.
While some co-streams include personal commentary or edits to a broadcast, as was the case with many influencers who co-streamed the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles earlier this summer, World Cup co-streams were direct, unedited rebroadcasts in live time.
Turner “Tfue” Tenney and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins were among the notable influencers to benefit from having a co-stream at the World Cup over the weekend. Blevins’ co-streams added 977K hours watched to the event overall as his stream even outperformed the main Fortnite channel at times during Friday’s broadcasts.
Tenney, on the other hand, only had one co-streamed broadcast, while he was personally competing in the solo finals on Sunday. That stream generated 261K hours watched with an average of 58K CCV over the weekend.
Meanwhile, Ryan “Chap” Chaplo co-streamed the weekend’s action with his own personal commentary over the tournament, averaging 37K concurrent viewers and generating 925K hours watched. Chaplo’s stream peaked at 75K CCV.
While the World Cup generated the strongest viewership that the title has seen since the summer of 2018, the three days of 14M hours watched on Twitch for the title didn’t go off without a hitch. In the past spectating for Fortnite esports events has been problematic. Last year, Epic Games’ Skirmish events that took place online had issues with servers not performing optimally causing issues for players in-game and fans watching.
Related Article: The Fortnite World Cup Experience: All About The Fans
During the main event competitions on Saturday and Sunday, third-person spectating of any given match performed without much issue, but when production transitioned to a specific players point of view, things started to get choppy and difficult to watch at times.
While a face camera of players during their time in the spotlight showed individuals playing without any sort of lag or lowered frame rate, the large screen showing gameplay to fans displayed extremely reduced frame rates at times making the competition tough to watch.
As Epic Games continues to develop Fortnite as an esport and attempt to market it as such, those sorts of technical issues will need to be addressed, but the occasional spectating problem clearly didn’t result in that many fans turning off the competition.
Fortnite may not be at the same level that it was during the summer of 2018 when Blevins was producing some of the highest viewership numbers Twitch as ever seen. However, this weekend’s World Cup showed that Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the world as an esport, even if its primary source of popularity is typically due to the influence of personality streamers.
