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The sequel almost never lives up to the expectations of the original. Any time a movie becomes a box office hit, the resounding approval by the general public makes producers think a second installment is a necessity. However, when the final product is released, it doesn’t garner nearly as much interest as its predecessor.
With a significant decline in viewership for this year’s Fortnite 
celebrity pro-am, it’s safe to say that the same sort of analysis reigns true of Epic Games’ event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles this past weekend.
Last year, Epic Games captivated Twitch at E3 with a Fortnite celebrity pro-am event that featured all of Twitch’s top influencers and a slew of star athletes, music artists, and actors recording 1.9M hours watched on the main channel for Fortnite. Co-streams by participants boosted viewership for the game as a whole on Twitch as well.
The gameplay during the event wasn’t nearly as important as the implications it gave off though. Fortnite’s success on Twitch took off following a stream by Tyler “Ninja” Blevins in which he played with rapper Drake, and just a couple months later Epic Games announced that it was going to dish out $100M in prize money for Fortnite esports in the 2018-2019 season.
Prior to last year’s celebrity pro-am in June, a competitive Fortnite event of that stature had never taken place. Getting that many high-profile influencers in one place to play Fortnite competitively was a new concept, and during a break in action, Epic Games even formally announced it plans to dive into esports with the Fortnite World Cup that’s set for next month.
This year’s event didn’t hold nearly the same sort of contextual weight, and viewership for Fortnite during the event conveyed that missing gravity. Fortnite as a category on Twitch had less than 3M hours watched for the entire day.
In 2018, Fortnite managed to rack up 5.5M hours watched during the day of the celebrity pro-am with the main broadcast for the event maintaining an average of 503K concurrent viewers despite the tournament happening on a Tuesday instead of a weekend.
This past weekend, the main broadcast on Fortnite’s Twitch channel wasn’t even able to average half that, but the lack of interest from the general public wasn’t due to a lessening in production quality for the event.
While only a few games of Fortnite were played at the celebrity pro-am, Epic Games made its production just that—Epic. Each team of streamer and celebrity was introduced one after another to begin the show with all the pomp and circumstance of a red carpet event.
Meanwhile, a few preplanned antics added some spice to the event. The WWE’s Xavier Woods entered the stage bearing a crown with a unicorn horn proclaiming that he would reign supreme as a “Unicorn King” in an introductory soliloquy. Additionally, Ben “DrLupo” Lupo and singer Jordan Fisher made a late entry after disguising themselves in the stands and holding posters that talked trash to their opponents.
All together, the event’s production quality and timing showed that Epic Games has become increasingly comfortable with putting on a show that complements the cartoonish charm of Fortnite.
However, without the same level of importance in the grand scope of Fortnite’s development as an esports and a pop culture phenomenon, this year’s event paled in comparison to last year’s pro-am from a viewership perspective.
