How many people play Fortnite? It’s a question that’s asked by the player base pretty regularly. Big event happens, you want to know if it broke the record. A bad season or update, let’s see how far its dropped! The game has its normal summer lull and the Fortnite player count’s decline means the sky is falling. But what does the Fortnite player count look like at the moment?
While the game hasn’t hit a new record for Fortnite player count in quite a while, it is healthy. The answer to how many people play Fortnite might slip as Chapters run on, but it’s usually easier to compare it to Steam as a whole than any other game. Still, the Fortnite player count is a fantastic tool for looking at how the game’s faring. When we get unpopular seasons, the player count tends to show it. Quite dramatically in some cases.
This is how the answer to how many people play Fortnite has changed recently, and what the current total looks like.
Right now, the average Fortnite player count in any given day tends to peak at around 1.2 million. Which is a sizeable number. Although, down from the all-time player high. This is what the last year has roughly looked like.
Looking through, you can see there’s normal peaks and drops depending on what’s happening. Events are clear spikes. New seasons tend to spike things up too. Whereas existing seasons tend to tick along, with their heights getting lower over time.
Over 2025 specifically, we can also see that intreat was maybe at its lowest for the Star Wars season. Players got involved for the event, but then it just slowly bleeds away. This isn’t too surprising, given we got a full month with the same theme we get every year as an event, and never really gets anyone excited anymore. Otherwise, the summer seasons have been a little shacky too, as the more casual focused ones tend to be.
That’s the answer to how many people play Fortnite in 2025, but it’s a bit more complicated. How does it compare to the game’s past, and is this a normal decline over the course of a year?
The big question with any game’s player count, is if it’s growing or declining. Fortnite tends to go through a specific pattern. New Chapters, new maps, and particularly the events that bring them in, get the most players. With new maps being particularly exciting.
Then, it’s diminishing returns with new seasons until the next Chapter. With the exception of noticeably bad seasons, which usually visibly get abandoned as they roll on, like the Wreked season.
So while the Fortnite player count is declining from its last peak, it’s doing so in the same pattern as it has for the last two years. A big spike for the new map, which releases at peak times. And then fewer players for a while later.
It’s probably unfair to call the Fortnite player count growing, since it’s nowhere near its peak. However, each new Chapter launch seems to grow compared to the last. So, on a zoomed-out scale, it does look quite healthy. It’s just that Fortnite alone can’t sustain the daily attention of so many people. In fact, the Fortnite player count record isn’t really achievable for every day play.
The record in the answer to how many people play Fortnite is 14.3 million, on record. That was for the Chapter 6 launch Remix live event. However, Epic only started giving live access to player counts recently. Before that, the Galactus event apparently got over 20 million players. That was very much a different time for the game though, and before we could actually track the Fortnite player count.
The record we can easier see is that 14 million peak. Outside of events, the launches of Chapter 5 and 6 have both been huge, as was Fortnite OG. Chapter 5 got more players on Day 1 than before, and so did Chapter 6. If this holds for another Chapter, then it’ll be a clear pattern for things.
The 14 million record player count can’t really be held up as Fortnite’s peak either. These live events don’t exactly count, players aren’t really playing the game, and everyone has to log on at once. Those same players are likely at least semi-active, since they check in for events. But more spread out throughout the month.
The Fortnite player count in Chapter 6 seems to have settled into quite a predictable format. However, there is a trend of boredom with Battle Royale. The peaks have been lower, and the drop offs harsher.
That could have something to do with how the game is right now. The last season has had multiple emergency patches to remove half the content for being broken. Season 3 had similar balance problems. The most stable season this Chapter, the one focused on gunplay and the new map, was by far the most popular. Yet novelty items and bad metas are consistently the focus for the game. It seems strange to continually chase a more casual audience, when the opposite seems to result in the best Fortnite player count in terms of stability. If not for records and peaks live the live events.
However, Chapter 6 hasn’t had a mis-step the size of Wrecked. With so many other modes, the player count might be becoming a bit more immune to fluctuations from Battle Royale. Now there’s so many other options.
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