Fortnite Creative Mode
The single largest viewed in-game concert was the Travis Scott in-game concert in April 2020, which drew 12.3 million in-game players to watch. The single largest viewed-in game event was the Devourer of Worlds Event, which brought 15.3 million in-game players and an additional 3.4 million people watching through streams. Solo mobile players, or squads entirely consisting of mobile players will play solely with other mobile players by default for fairness; players however can use cross-platform play to join squads on other platforms, and matchmaking will consider all available matches. With the March 2019 for cross-platform play, the game will similar matchmake PlayStation 4 and Xbox One users by default to avoid these players being at a disadvantage against computer users. Travis Scott performed a virtual "Astronomical" tour in support of his 2018 album Astroworld within Fortnite on multiple live concerts between April 23 and 25, 2020, including the premier of a new song, The Scotts, featuring Kid Cudi. The first performance on April 23 was estimated to have drawn over 12.3 million players to watch, while a total of 27.7 million unique viewers cumulatively watched the concerts.
Epic filed a second similar lawsuit in November 2019 against a tester out of Keywords Studio in Montreal over similar Chapter 2 leaks that were in breach of the terms of their non-disclosure agreement. A release of Fortnite for the Nintendo Switch video game console had been rumored in the week prior to the E in June 2018. It is the first game to support direct voice chat through the Switch console through software provided by Vivox. With the success of the Switch version of Fortnite, Vivox had made its voice chat software development kit available for other Switch games.
One of the first major streams of Fortnite was in March 2018, in which Tyler "Ninja" Blevins hosted a stream that included Drake, Travis Scott, Kim DotCom, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster all playing the game. The stream broke over 635,000 concurrent viewers, making it the highest-watched stream on Twitch outside of esports tournaments at the time. YouTube streamer Rubén Doblas Gundersen held a Fortnite Battle Royale match with 99 other well-known YouTube streamers in late March, which drew over 1.1 million viewers, Fortnite Funny making it one of the most-watched gaming YouTube streams. The Fortnite Pro-Am event held at E was estimated to have drawn over 1.3 million views across Twitch and other streaming services, making it one of the highest-viewed live-streamed event to date.
The game initially launched without any seasonable schedule, but starting with the release of Chapter 1 Season 2 in December 2017, Epic has provided new content, which includes new cosmetics, new gameplay elements, and changes to the game's map, on a roughly 10-week basis. This also introduced the use of the battle pass for players to obtain some of this new content by completing challenges and gaining experience. The main gameplay for Fortnite Battle Royale follows the standard format for the battle royale genre. The game normally is played either with each player on their own, or in a squad of two to four players, with up to 100 players participating each round.
When playing in solo modes, players are immediately eliminated when they exhaust their health. In squad modes, downed players can crawl around while losing health; they can be eliminated immediately by an opponent or revived by a squadmate to help them up. Initially, when the game launched, eliminated players were out of the match, but starting with updates in April 2019, squadmates can attempt to respawn a downed player at various "Reboot vans" scattered around the map, which are few and far between and in the open, making it a risk to respawn a squadmate. Over time, the game's safe zone , decreases in size, and players caught outside the zone will take damage.
Fortnite Battle Royale has created a larger loose narrative that is exhibited through changes in the game map, which generally correlated to the start and end of the in-game season. This tied into several new cosmetic skins related to superheroes and super-villains that were available that month. Epic has the ability to create custom events that occur across all game servers simultaneously as well; the first example of such was a countdown leading to a giant rocket's launch in June 2018 which, in the aftermath, left cracks in the skies that have grown since that event.