A Staggering Number Of People Saw Fortnite’s Travis Scott ‘Astronomical’ Event

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

It’s not shocking that we’d see impressive viewership numbers from Fortnite’s “Astronomical” eventâ€"not only did the Marshmello concert set records, but we’re currently going through a crippling pandemic that has seen entire countries locked down for weeks on end. Even so, it’s impressive to see it spelled outâ€"after the first show, Epic said that 12.3 million people had tuned in for the premiere. After five shows, the developer says that number has reached up to 27.7 million unique viewers, with 45.8 million views, suggesting plenty of people saw multiple shows.

The Travis Scott event built off of the success of the Marshmello concert from a while back, but while Marshmello’s set hewed much more closely to a format where a (virtual) performer stood on a (virtual) stage to entertain (real?) fans, this one sort of blew up that whole idea. Instead of a rapping on a traditional stage, Scott took the form of a striding giant, stomping through the map before the entire thing took a series of even more psychedelic turns, transporting the player underwater, into space, and towards a floating amusement park for later tracks.

If the Marshmello event proved that the format could be deployed without technical hiccups and without compromising a concept of live music, the Scott event took it many, many steps further, offering a blueprint for an interactive music video of the sort we’ve never really seen before.

It’s clear that this is not the last such event that we’re going to see in Fortnite, and maybe in other games too. Fortnite has been pushing itself past battle royale for a long time now, but this shows how it’s also aiming to push itself even past traditional, competitive gameplay: for many, online games have become a meeting place during times of physical separation, and things like this give us an idea of what these meeting spaces might look like beyond traditional ideas of gameplay.

It’s also worth nothing that this whole thing was made from home, which is a staggering achievement in and of itself.

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