Marshmello’s Fortnite Concert Pulls Huge Viewers

It’s the biggest in-game concert ever, at least by the concurrency numbers. Earlier today, popular musician Marshmello put on a major concert inside of Fortnite. As of this writing, the crowd viewing the concert is estimated to have been over six million! It’s unclear whether or not that’s counting the number of people where were watching the concert outside of the game on various streaming services, but either way that’s a huge number.

Dedicated Fortnite site Fortnite Bunker has some amazing pictures of the event. It definitely looks like Epic pulled all the stops to make this a one of a kind experience for all those who were able to attend. Or perhaps two of a kind. According to Marshmello’s Twitter, there will be an encore show at 2am (EST?) early Sunday morning. For anyone who missed the first go, and really wants to be there live, this will be the only other opportunity.

Marshmello’s Youtube channel also cut together a ten-minute video of the first concert.

This is hardly the first time that a multiplayer game has had an in-game or even server wide event. World of Warcraft has seen plenty of server-wide meetups, battles, and even memorial services over the years, as have other major MMOs such as Eve Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. What makes this event unique, however, is the scope and attendance. Eve Online, which runs the entire world in a single instance, has a concurrency record of just over 65,000 concurrent users, according to stat site Eve-Offline. Server-wide events in WoW are much smaller, since the max server population is significantly lower.

To put that six million viewer number in perspective, it’s roughly three times more people than will tune in to watch Jimmy Kimmel on The Tonight Show, and a bit less than double Colbert’s viewers for each episode of The Late Show. It’s about half as many people as tune in to watch an episode of Young Sheldon on Thursday night, but there’s also probably not a lot of overlap between those viewers and the ones hanging out for an in-game Marshmello concert. All stats courtesy of TV By The Numbers.