Birthday royale: Hit videogame Fortnite is celebrating a 6th anniversary

Birthday royale

The wildly popular videogame Fortnite Battle Royale celebrates its 6th anniversary later this month, ringing in the occasion with birthday bundles, events, and quests for the hundreds of millions of players who devote hours to the ultra-addictive game.

In the real world, however, there isn’t as much to celebrate for the company behind Fortnite. Epic Games, which also developed the successful Gears of War series, is dealing out $245 million from its player refund pot — part of a $520 million settlement it reached with the FTC last December.

Not so epic

The FTC alleged that Epic Games had been swindling Fortniters — and, oftentimes, many of their unwitting parents — out of millions of dollars for in-game purchases, using “dark patterns” to trick players into making unwanted purchases and get children to use their moms' and dads' cash for “skins” and “emotes” they knew nothing about.

While the settlement’s implications won’t deter die-hard Fortnite devotees, it seems that some have been getting bored of the game for a while, at least if Twitch streams are anything to go by. Fortnite fans started flocking to the streaming platform almost immediately after Battle Royale was introduced in September 2017, with concurrent viewership peaking less than a year later when 205,000 fans would tune in to watch people stream Fortnite at any one time. However, as the game-changing game mode turns 6, that figure's a mere ~25% of its peak, with 53,000 simultaneous viewers on average.