Fortnite in 2018: all the biggest news, from Drake to the World Cup

Fortnite was far and away the biggest game of 2018, despite the fact that it actually debuted in 2017. But its rise to full-blown cultural phenomenon wasn’t exactly expected. In fact, the game started its life as a co-operative survival game where players had to work together to build shelters and fight off zombie hordes. But the “Save the World” mode, as it’s known, never really caught on.

It wasn’t until Fortnite jumped into the burgeoning battle royale scene last September that it took off. Initially seen as a game chasing the success of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite steadily took over the space. Its free-to-play nature, combined with developer Epic Games’ breakneck update pace, allowed the game to flourish, constantly changing in ways both obvious and unexpected.

It felt like Fortnite was everywhere in 2018. There were Fortnite dances at the World Cup, the game dominated E3 in Los Angeles, and streamers like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins were turned into overnight celebrities. It’s hard to believe just how much happened in such a short time. So we’ve decided to round up all of the biggest moments in Fortnite over the course of the last year to chart the game’s ascent to the top of the entertainment world.

January–February

At the beginning of the year, Fortnite was still quietly chugging along, but it had recently undergone some changes that would become fundamental to its popularity. In December 2017, Epic released the game’s second season and debuted the battle pass, a series of challenges and item unlocks that proved much more appealing and engaging than just buying in-game items with cash. Then season 3 came in February 2018, which further refined the concept, introducing the now-familiar weekly challenges that keep players coming back.

Despite its much lower profile, Fortnite was still very popular at this point. In fact, at the beginning of February, the game reached a new peak of 3.4 million concurrent players, which, in turn, led to a service outage for many, as the game’s structure failed to cope with the influx of players. Epic even wrote a detailed blog explaining just what went wrong. “It’s been an amazing and exhilarating experience to grow Fortnite from our previous peak of 60,000 concurrent players to 3.4 million in just a few months,” the developer said at the time.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

March

In a lot of ways, March was Fortnite’s coming-out party. First came word that the game was going to expand to mobile platforms, further extending its reach. Also around this time came the first hints of a brewing drama that would only escalate as Microsoft revealed that Sony was blocking cross-play between PS4 and Xbox One players, something that had been a sticking point with many fans.

“That was pretty lit man.”

The big day came on March 15th when Drake decided to hop on a Twitch stream with Ninja to play Fortnite. They were joined by Travis Scott and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster, and the squad managed to shatter Twitch’s record for concurrent viewers with 628,000, handily beating out the previous record of 388,000. “That was pretty lit man,” Ninja said after the stream was over. “About as lit as it can get.”

Fortnite’s continued mainstream popularity had huge consequences. We learned that the game had finally surpassed PUBG, its biggest rival, in monthly revenue. Meanwhile, development on the game continued on, and Epic launched a new replay editor aimed specifically at streamers and YouTubers like Ninja.

April

Fortnite made its iPhone debut at the beginning of April, and while the touchscreen version was far from the best, it still proved to be immensely popular. Analyst firm Sensor Tower even claimed that the game had made $15 million on iOS in its first three days, topping the likes of Candy Crush Saga and Pokémon Go. Meanwhile, Drake and Ninja hooked up again to play some duos. And while the stream didn’t break any new records, it did result in some cash donated to charity.

Midway through the month, Epic released a new 50 versus 50 mode for the game, which had previously only been available for a brief period last December. It was vastly different from the main battle royale experience, with a hectic battle that also encouraged players to work together and help out. More importantly, it showed that Epic wasn’t afraid to mess with the formula in the hopes of finding the next big thing.

May

Season 4 of Fortnite showed just how good Epic was becoming at using its world to tell a story. Over the previous few weeks, the developer had teased a major event, and it culminated with a meteor crashing on the island, introducing some dramatic changes to the way the game is played. The new season also had a superhero theme, which fit well with a collaboration between Fortnite and the Avengers, in which players could take on the role of Thanos in a limited-time mode.

Epic revealed that the much-anticipated Android version of the game would be coming in the summer, while also detailing its ambitious plans to turn Fortnite into a viable e-sport. The developer pledged a hefty $100 million for the next year of competitive play, which resulted in a large number of e-sports teams taking Fortnite seriously. But that wasn’t the biggest Fortnite-related number of the month: we also learned that the game raked in nearly $300 million in April.

It wasn’t all great news, however. Later in May, the developers behind PUBG sued Epic, citing copyright infringement. The developer had said that it had “growing concerns” about the similarities between the two games back in 2017, but it didn’t file a suit until now.

June

June was an incredibly busy time for Fortnite. It all started with a rumor that the game was coming to the Nintendo Switch, which was later confirmed during Nintendo’s E3 presentation when the game was not only officially announced, but it also launched on the Switch. It only took 24 hours to hit 2 million downloads on Nintendo’s tablet.

Arguably, the biggest story of the month was an escalation of the cross-play controversy. Switch players soon learned that they couldn’t access their Fortnite account if it originated on the PS4, which made a lot of people very mad. Sony was largely silent on the matter, before issuing a very tepid statement.

The cross-play controversy escalated

Meanwhile, a lot of things were happening in and around the game. The humble shopping cart introduced the idea of vehicles to Fortnite, Epic announced plans for a Fortnite World Cup in 2019, and a celebrity-filled E3 tournament proved to be the ideal showcase for the game. Its popularity only continued to grow. Fortnite hit 125 million players in June, while previous frontrunner PUBG — which ultimately dropped its lawsuit — made its own version of the battle pass. There were even Fortnite goal celebrations at the World Cup in Russia.

July–August

The summer was comparatively quiet. July kicked off with the launch of a creative “playground” mode, which bore a strong resemblance to Minecraft. Season 5 also debuted with a continued focus on vehicles by introducing golf karts, as well as dramatically altering the island with a huge desert location. Meanwhile, Fortnite celebrated its first birthday, and the competitive “summer skirmish” series showed that Epic still had a long way to go to make Fortnite into a proper e-sport.

In August, the game finally made its way to Android, but the launch didn’t go exactly as anticipated. Instead of releasing through the Google Play Store, Epic created its own Fortnite launcher in order to skirt Google’s fees. On top of that, the game was a Samsung exclusive at launch, though it wasn’t long before it came to other Android devices as well.

Toward the end of the month, Fortnite’s island was plagued by a lightning storm, which ultimately birthed one of the game’s great mysteries: a giant purple cube.

September

In late September, Fortnite celebrated the one-year anniversary of its battle royale mode, just as its first season tournament circuit came to a close. The Summer Skirmish series was plagued with early issues and took quite a while to find its footing, but it was eventually transformed into a cohesive, well-formulated competitive series that featured a nail-biting final at PAX West in Seattle.

One year later, Fortnite became impossible to ignore, both for comedians and businesses alike. Saturday Night Live featured a bit about the game with actor Adam Driver playing a clueless dad. Nintendo also launched a proper Fortnite Switch bundle. Sony, which had previously found itself in hot water for refusing to allow cross-play between competing consoles, caved in unprecedented fashion and began allowing PS4 accounts to play Fortnite on other systems.

The month was not without some drawbacks, however. Fortnite still found itself playing second fiddle to Minecraft in terms of YouTube popularity, while an embarrassing breast animation made its way into season 6 and was promptly removed following vocal criticism.

Meanwhile, in-game, the cube toppled itself into Loot Lake, turning the entire body of water into an elastic purple trampoline in preparation of season 6, which launched roughly a week later and brought with it enormous floating islands in the sky. The season also came with interactive backpack pets, perhaps the most adorable feature in the game.

October

In early October, Epic began shifting more resources toward game design outside the core battle royale style with the announcement of its “Disco Domination” mode. Featuring dance floors you had to bust a move on to raise your score, the mode was notable for allowing respawns and moving away from the highly competitive nature of the core game. That same month, the Android version of Fortnite exited its brief beta period and opened to everyone.

Because Halloween was fast approaching, Epic used the opportunity to lean more heavily into limited-time seasonal map changes with “Fortnitemare,” which mixed in AI-controlled cube zombies for players to contend with during standard matches. The company also brought back the coveted skull trooper skin and created a community frenzy, showing how lucrative its strategy of artificial scarcity is when applied to limited-time virtual goods. In mid-October, Fortnite got its third vehicle in the form of the Quadcrasher, a build-busting quad bike with some surprising aerial boost abilities.

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In terms of broader popularity, Fortnite continued to dominate the industry. The game got its own Nerf gun licensing deal, while Ninja appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and announced a special New Year’s Eve live stream from Times Square. In yet another sign that Fortnite’s growth was not slowing down anytime soon, Nintendo revealed that the game was downloaded on nearly half of all Switch systems ever sold.

November

November contained a flurry of Fortnite activity, starting with the first substantial map change not tied to a seasonal turnover. The mysterious cube, which traveled to Loot Lake and created the game’s floating islands, initiated another of Epic’s rare in-game events: this time, transporting players into a mystical realm full of ethereal butterflies. When everyone exited the realm, a new island had spawned at Loot Lake’s center.

Not known to stop building on its environmental storytelling, Epic began teasing an upcoming change to Risky Reels with a Wreck-It-Ralph cameo on the movie screen. The developer also launched a new “Food Fight” game mode that, again, centered on objective play instead of survival, featuring respawns and giant home bases for players to attack. November was also when Epic finally launched a gifting feature for in-game items, and it’s when Fortnite inked a deal with the NFL to sell official team skins.

With regard to the competitive scene, November featured the launch of the Winter Royale tournament, with this series open to all players and not just celebrities, e-sports athletes, and streamers invited by Epic directly. Fortnite star Ninja also had yet another big month, announcing a partnership with electronic music label Astralwerks to release an album of music marketed to his massive Fortnite fan base and designed to be royalty-friendly for his Twitch streams.

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December

Epic ended the year with a bang, announcing a slew of huge business-related news alongside season 7 and some headline-grabbing changes to the core gameplay. To start, Epic announced and then surprise-launched its own PC game store, which now exists inside the same Epic Launcher that millions of players use to play Fortnite every day. The developer also introduced Creative mode, a new, do-anything playground for players to experiment in full Minecraft-style fashion. Even better was the announcement, during The Game Awards, that Risky Reels would be transforming into “The Block,” a portion of the game that will feature player-designed assets and environments from Creative mode.

With the season 7 launch, Fortnite expanded the size of its map by adding an all-new, Arctic-themed section covering the southwest corner. The season also brought the first air vehicle — a fighter plane — as well as zip lines for speedier travel and more dynamic combat. One hiccup for Epic was the introduction shortly after of the Infinity Blade from the studio’s mobile game trilogy of the same name. The sword briefly seemed like a neat addition as the first proper melee weapon, but it proved too powerful. After announcing two ways to reduce its viability, Epic ended up removing the Infinity Blade and announcing that it would rethink its strategy for deploying “mythic” items in the future.

To close out the year, Epic announced that it would make the cross-platform software it developed to build Fortnite available for all developers who use its Unreal Engine toolset. The move was yet another aggressive push from Epic to truly compete with Valve and its Steam store. December also marked the moment when the brewing and controversial emote debate boiled over with two real lawsuits, one from rapper 2 Milly and the other from Fresh Prince actor Alfonso Ribeiro. Both claim Epic took signature dances they created and turned them into in-game emotes that the developer then financially benefited from, kicking off a complex copyright debate that won’t be settled for quite some time.

As the end of 2018 approaches, things aren’t slowing down: just last night, Ninja appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to talk all things Fortnite, including teaching the host his signature dance.