Fame and ‘Fortnite’ — inside the global gaming phenomenon
It’s captivated a generation of teens. Now it’s making millionaires of its star players
At first, it seems like any other sporting event. Parents sip beer from clear plastic cups. Children eat overpriced soft pretzels and pizza, holding giant red styrofoam hands I recognise from baseball games.
But instead of a grassy field, today the Arthur Ashe stadium in Queens — best known for hosting tennis stars for the glitzy US Open — is anchored by a massive three-tier purple stage attached to the roof by cables. Tens of thousands of spectators are here to witness 200 players fight to the death on a virtual island. In reality, this translates to watching teenage boys — and they are all boys — pound their keyboards for roughly four hours. The last boy standing will be crowned a millionaire.
I am at the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. At this three-day, Disneyland-esque festival, the virtual monsters and online memes of Fortnite, the global gaming phenomenon, have been transposed into the real world. This is Woodstock for a generation raised on smartphones and ipads.
Fortnite is technically a video game, and one with a simple premise. At the start, players drop on to an island and shoot each other until only one person is left standing. Each match lasts about 20 minutes and slowly, the numbers whittle down. A storm
approaches, making the map smaller and smaller. If you jump off the island you die. Antoine Griezmann, the French football star, said playing Fortnite makes him more stressed than professional football.
But Fortnite is so wildly popular that it’s become more than just a game: today it’s a social media platform in its own right, driving pop culture among teenagers — everything from clothing to dance crazes. It’s also at the forefront of esports, competitive online gaming that is attracting ever more sponsors to sell to ever bigger spectatorships. With more than 250m users across the globe, if it were a country Fortnite would be the fifth largest in the world. The Fortnite World Cup drew 2.3m concurrent viewers on Youtube and the streaming platform Twitch, according to Epic, the game’s developer.
The prize money for the competition is equally outsized. Wanting to create high stakes, Epic, backed by private equity group KKR and Chinese giant Tencent, shelled out $30m for prizes. The winner — Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf, a 16-year-old from Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania — walked away with $3m. That is almost six times more money than the cyclist who wins the Tour de France. It’s closer to the $3.8m taken home by the professional tennis champions of the US Open, which will be held at this same stadium later this month.