“What are a few hours playing videogames and a handful of tweets worth? $1 million if you are Tyler Blevins, known to millions as « Ninja, » the world’s most-followed computer gamer. ”
“If you haven’t heard of Ninja, ask the nearest 12-year-old. He shot to fame in March after he and Drake played Fortnite, the video game phenomenon in which 100 players are dropped onto an island and battle to be the last one standing while building forts that are used to both attack and hide from opponents. At its peak, Ninja and Drake’s game, which also featured rapper Travis Scott and Pittsburgh Steelers receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, pulled in 630,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, Amazon’s livestreaming platform, shattering the previous record of 388,000. Since then, Ninja has achieved what no other gamer has before: mainstream fame. With 11 million Twitch followers and climbing, he commands an audience few can dream of. In April, he logged the most social media interactions in the entire sports world, beating out the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Shaquille O’Neal and Neymar”.
“In October of 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created Pong, which is thought to be the world’s first video game. Since then, video games have become part of mainstream culture, and every so often a transcendent game comes out, like Pac-Man or World of Warcraft, that brings in billions in revenue. Released in July of 2017, Fortnite may be on track to become that kind of game. Fortnite, a cooperative survival game, has gone viral on a global scale in 2018. The game itself is free to download, which makes it particularly appealing, but it makes its money through in-game purchases that players have the option to buy. In fact, an April report by analytics firm Sensor Tower found that Fortnite was making an average of $1 million every single day from player spending”.
“Developer Epic Games announced today that Fortnite has grown to 125 million registered players in less than a year. The metric, confirmed in a blog post about the game’s $100 million e-sports competition, is the first updated player figures from Epic since the company confirmed the game had been downloaded 45 million times back in January”.