The Big Bang event in Fortnite that featured Eminem attracted a record audience.
The expectations have been high from the very beginning. Comparing streaming numbers with the two most successful previous Fortnite concerts — the Ariana Grande and Travis Scott shows — we expected to see millions of viewers coming to the game’s virtual reality.
In the real world, though, it is more difficult to count the attendance as Epic Games doesn’t release official numbers, and journalists work around this secrecy, making estimations based on tangents and connections.
Yes, we already know that the attendance was so high that the Fortnite servers couldn’t cope, and an undisclosed amount of users have never been admitted to the show due to the unprecedented waiting time. This alone tells us a lot about the interest in the event, which is evidently much higher than any previous concerts.
However, direct participation was not the only way to see the show. Streamers provided access to this experience through their video channels, giving many people an opportunity to see the concert.
The recently published Variety article on the Eminem Fortnite show provided information from the biggest game streaming platform: “According to Twitch, 186,000 streamers went live in the Fortnite category during the event, which had the highest concurrent viewership for any event in the gaming category in the platform’s history”.
Of course, this number doesn’t include YouTube streams, of which there are many as well. Our team organised the stream on our YouTube channel that day, and we had around 4000 viewers at the peak. There is no way to count the streams from YouTube across all channels manually, but you better believe that the viewership was unprecedented.
Watch Eminem Fortnite performance below:
