Last weekend, Epic Games’ Fortnite had 3.4 million concurrent players log into the game. Not only did this break a record previously held by PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds, but it also crashed the game’s servers.
According to Epic Games, it came down to the technical details and the challenges of having to “rapidly scale” Fortnite, as the game has managed to grow beyond the company’s “wildest growth expectations.” In the long run, Fortnite’s popularity seems like a good thing, especially considering the Battle Royale mode is free. As far as last weekend, however, the massive number of players created six different incidents that resulted in a numerous partial and total service disruptions.
On its growing base and the recent outages, the Fortnite team stated the following:
“Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now. We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action…The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base.”
It does seem like the popularity of Fortnite is still on the rise, as Chance the Rapper also loves the game, even tweeted about wanting a Nintendo Switch port of the game. The reply was promising, so gamers may just have to wait and see. Hopefully, a port will be able to handle the popularity, and Epic Games has most of these issues resolved by then.
To handle the influx of players, Fortnite has revealed several steps it intends to take in order to ensure service availability. The list includes various improvements such as “digging deeper into their data and DB storage,” “scaling their internal infrastructure,” “moving specific functionality out of MCP to microservices,” and more. While the recent patch provided gamers with Valentine’s Day skins and a crossbow, it’s nice to know that Epic Games is hard at work on the technical issues of the game.
Fortnite is available now in early access for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.