Fortnite’s 2023 Global Championship was the most popular event of the game since 2019
The FNCS 2023 Global Championship capped off the 2023 FNCS, the first season of the new three Splits format introduced to the discipline. The tournament became the fourth-most popular Fortnite event of all time and brought the discipline back to the height of popularity it previously had in 2018/2019.
The event took place in Copenhagen across the second weekend of October and saw Cooper and Mero of North America take home $1M USD of the $4M prize pool. The new 2023 format placed much more importance on the final event of the year, and this was reflected in the new larger prize pool and in the end also the viewership of the event.
FNCS 2023 Global Championship Viewership
The event reached a peak viewership of 722K concurrent spectators during the final round of the Final event. 50 of the best duos of the tournament competed simultaneously to complete the 100-player matches that fans have come to expect from a Battle Royale format.
The 2023 Global Championship was also available for fans to spectate on the official Fortnite website, as well as in-game through a spectating system where fans could place themselves directly in the action. It’s impossible to collect viewership statistics from these two sources, so it’s likely that total viewership was even higher than recorded on just streaming services.
The Global Championship of 2023 garnered 5.79M hours of watch time and maintained 375K concurrent viewers on average throughout the weekend. Comparing this to the Fortnite Champion Series 2022 Invitational, the 2023 event looks extremely strong in comparison. In both Hours Watched and Peak Viewers, the final event of the 2023 season almost doubled its viewership compared to the previous year. Average Viewers also grew by over 100K, a significant uptick from the 260K AV achieved by the 2022 Invitational.
In the end, Cooper and Mero were victorious, thanks to their 2nd place finishes in the first two rounds of the event. Although they struggled to place highly in the final rounds of the match, their early lead was enough for them to achieve 330 points, 59 points more than the second-highest-scoring team. The two North Americans also stood out from the other duos to place in the top 5 of the event, as they were the only duo to both be independent players and not represent any organisation.
Fortnite as an esports discipline has been burdened with its own height of popularity that it received in the years before the pandemic. Although other esports disciplines typically reached their peak popularity during this period, Fortnite has struggled to recreate the massive popularity it earned during these years, and the esports events of the previous few years have not been able to reach the same heights.
The FNCS 2023 Global Championship marks the biggest event for Fortnite’s esports scene since these years, and the FNCS 2023 Global Championship became the fourth-most popular event in Fortnite’s esports history, and the only event from 2020 onwards to rank so highly.
Benefitting from the game’s mainstream popularity at the time, the Fortnite World Cup 2019 Finals was the most popular event in Fortnite history, with 2.33M Peak Viewers recorded during the tournament. The Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am of 2018 was also hugely popular, combining the game’s mainstream popularity with the competitive esports scene; the combined forces earned the event 1.97M Peak Viewers.
Although the 2023 Global Championship was not able to break the 1M PV barrier or compete with these aforementioned events in terms of popularity, it does mark an important turning point for the discipline. The boost in viewership for the event was also helped by the community casters of the event, of which there were more than double compared to 2022.
With the new FNCS format going into its second year for 2024, Fortnite seems to have found a winning formula for viewership and exposure to a larger esports scene. Fortnite is finding its own standing as a professional esports discipline, and the game’s competitive scene is healthier than in previous years.
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