Top 5 Times Fortnite Battle Royale Dominated Headlines In March

Fortnite Battle Royale is huge right now. Like, really really huge. It's so huge that most sites – not just mainstream news, but gaming sites that should know better – are simply referring to it as “Fortnite” because the PvE “Save the World” part of the game has been all but forgotten. If we had to guess, we'd say that an H1Z1-style split/rebranding is in the works. Hopefully, Save the World won't suffer the same fate as H1Z1's nearly abandoned survival mode.

In the meantime … Fortnite Fortnite Fortnite. There, that ought to get our SEO up to the top of Google search results, perhaps even enough to compete with all the other sites out there. We at MMOBomb don't begrudge our fellow news outlets for reporting on anything and everything Fortnite because, hey, you gotta earn those clicks (and a living) somehow. There was so much going on that if we wanted to, we probably could have crafted a new Fortnite story every day this month.

We didn't want to rename our site FortniteBomb, however, so we've compiled what we think were the most interesting Fortnite stories from the past month. That way, we get some of that sweet clickbait traffic, but if you don't like it, you've only wasted a little bit of time. Seems like a fair compromise, doesn't it?

Also … Fortnite Fortnite Fortnite. And Fortnite. Take that, search algorithms!

Drake and Ninja play Fortnite

This is the one that really seemed to kick off the “every day I'm Fortnite-ing” coverage. Streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins somehow got rapper Drake to play Fortnite Battle Royale with him, which led to a record 635,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. Ninja added 90,000 Twitch subs during his stream – that translates to over $200,000, if you're keeping track – and was interviewed by CNBC, turning both him and Fortnite into pseudo-household names.

One million people watched a Fortnite stream

635,000 viewers is a lot, but what about (Dr. Evil voice): one million viewers? That's how many people tuned in at one time to watch elrubiusOMG stream Fortnite via YouTube just three days ago. Like Ninja, elrubiusOMG had some help – in this case, 99 other YouTubers, who joined in the massive battle royale melee that lasted over three hours.

As a side note, if you think we're out for easy clicks, check out the URL of that Polygon article. “Hey, let's just toss 'ninja' and 'drake' in our link, to make sure we get more hits!”

Fortnite is ruining schools' Wi-Fi

Kids these days and their vidya gamez, amirite? Fortnite on mobile is the bane of teachers throughout the U.S., as students sneak in games before and during classes. Even the non-playing students are feeling the pain: “My schools wifi is ass ever since all these jokers got Fortnite mobile,” one student in Colorado laments. I can remember the first time someone brought a Game Boy to my high school in 1990, and that was distracting enough.

PlayerUnknown thinks Fortnite is a good thing

Remember when it looked like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds publisher Bluehole Studios sounded like it wanted to sue Epic Games and PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, hoped companies wouldn't make a “carbon copy” of PUBG? Whatever animosity might have existed seems to have mellowed, with Greene saying at last week's GDC that “It's great that the battle royale space is expanding,” thanks to Fortnite. Now, if Greene can just get rappers and NFL players to stream his game ...

UMBC players compare NCAA tournament upset to winning in Fortnite

As one final sign of just how much Fortnite is now in the mainstream, there's this. For those who don't follow college basketball, this month's annual “March Madness” tournament saw perhaps the greatest upset of all time, when #16 seeded University of Maryland, Baltimore County beat #1 seed Virginia – the first time a #16 seed has beaten a #1 seed. What was that like for the UMBC Retrievers? According to a couple of players, it was like winning their first Victory Royale in Fortnite.

Granted, the players were prompted by the interviewer – who himself must have been aware of the Fortnite phenomenon – but the speed at which the players agreed to the reference demonstrates how quickly Fortnite Battle Royale has entered the national consciousness. Maybe someone should ask Epic Games how that feels.