Fortnite‘s OG Island release has the once-culturally dominant game back on top of the world again. According to the official X account for the game, Nov. 4 was the biggest day in the game’s history, with over 100 million hours played and over 44 million unique players on the servers.
The dominant numbers don’t end there. On Nov. 3, around 1/3rd of all players that logged into an Xbox or a PlayStation played Fortnite, according to video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella. The statistics, which show astronomical growth, are truly staggering.
At one point, Fortnite was one of the biggest cultural forces in the world. Canadian rapper Drake played the game with Ninja and NFL wideout Juju Smith-Schuster, Twitch was exploding with people who wanted to watch the game, and it was featured in a scene in Avengers: Endgame. Brands across the globe rushed to put their intellectual property in the game, leading to players being able to play with skins that featured the Master Chief, Goku, and John Cena.
In recent history, that interest has waned as players moved on to other titles, but they’ll always have fond memories of the original Fortnite experience. Effectively, the OG Fortnite mode is the Halo 3 for Gen Z, a classic game that they remember playing all night with their childhood friends.
That nostalgia factor has led to a boom in Fortnite popularity that we really haven’t seen since the period from 2018 to 2020. While the OG island is only available for a limited time, there’s a chance that lapsed players will stick around to see what Fortnite has become over the years. Now, the real question: Will Epic consider keeping the mode around permanently, or even just bring it back in the future in hopes of similar player count spikes?
