Since its launch in late September 2017, free-to-play cartoon game Fortnite: Battle Royale has taken the gaming world by storm, blowing up to become the most popular game right now, boasting an impressive 3.4 million concurrent players worldwide at all times. Each game consists of 100 players who land into a map and have to fight and kill each other with the ultimate aim of being the last man standing.
For many who may not understand the impact of this game, it has proven to have a substantial effect on popular culture, particularly those of school age. Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins (a 26-year-old live streamer on video game streaming platform ‘Twitch’) told in a recent interview of his mammoth income of an estimated $500,000 a month, a revenue accumulated from a variety of platforms such as his 3.7m Twitch followers, 5m YouTube subscribers and plethora of brand deals and associations. Ninja recently live streamed him playing Fortnite on Twitch with two best-selling hip-hop artists Drake and Travis Scott, which amassed a record breaking 635,000 concurrent viewers.
Many parents have been worried about their children playing the game, stating that it provides a distraction from studying and school work, and seeing the success of streamers like Ninja encourages children to abandon the pursuit of academia in favour of the extremely risky world of streaming.
Well aware of this, Ninja spoke out in an interview, stating “I continued to do well in school and focus on the future of my life as well as working on streaming… Honestly, I encourage everyone to do that. All the kids out there: you can't just drop everything to focus on playing video games for a living… make sure you're securing your future while putting the extra time to make this happen as well”.
It has been a successful boom for both Epic Games (producers of Fortnite) and those such as Ninja benefitting from donations and subscriptions on Twitch, and this success does not look to come to a halt any time soon.
By Kai Melhuish
