Call of Duty, EA Sports FC, Roblox and GTA Online Not Enough to Beat Fortnite on Consoles
Fortnite is the king of consoles, even „perennial” GTA 5 and Call of Duty pale in comparison.
More than six years have passed since the premiere of Fortnite, and yet it's still one of the most popular and highest-grossing games out there. In fact, at the end of 2023, the work of the Epic Games studio was more popular than EA Sports FC 24, Roblox, GTA V and several installments of the Call of Duty series... combined.
This is according to the Ampere Analysis group's report on the number of active users in particular months (Monthly Active Users, MAU) on PlayStation and Xbox. Already in November, Fortnite gained a huge number of players. The time they spent in the game increased by 146% month over month, thanks to the new, nostalgic season.
This allowed Epic Games to approach Electronic Arts â?? the undisputed leader on consoles. At least until December, when EA had to give way to EG.
We are writing about the position of Epic Games, but let's remember that its only title included in the statistics is Fortnite. So, one game surpasses the results of entire publishing catalogs of large, industry powerhouses. It sounds absurd, but it's not entirely surprising.
However, it may be a bit shocking that other, otherwise extremely popular titles don't even come close to matching more than 1.6 billion hours spent in Fortnite by players in December. As we mentioned at the beginning, this is more than the combined result of six games: Call of Duty HQ (i.e. Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone 2.0), Grand Theft Auto V (probably mainly the GTA Online online module), Roblox and EA Sports FC 24. Each of these games is a gold mine for their publishers, outclassing most of the competition. Despite this, Fortnite has completely overshadowed them.
In other news, Ampere draws attention to the decline in the condition of Activision Blizzard, which was overtaken by Take-Two Interactive in December. The latter publisher â?? after significant declines â?? achieved considerable success, mainly thanks to the unflagging popularity of GTA V, although the company was also aided by the increased interest in LEGO 2K Drive. This, in turn, resulted from the addition of the title to the PS Plus service offer during the holiday season, although the game could also have been popularized by the premiere of another LEGO title (or rather game mode).
Nevertheless, the waning result of AB may be surprising. Ampere analysts point to the declining popularity of Diablo IV as the reason: in December, players spent an average of 10 hours less in Sanctuary than in the previous month. This may also be a result of the lukewarm reception to Modern Warfare 3, although the report's authors claim that the Call of Duty series did "relatively" well during the holiday season.
