Like two sumo wrestlers going at each other, the big multiplayer shooters continue to one-up each other with more and more players joining the fray. This time it was Epic Games’ Fortnite, which the developers boasted had beaten the record for most concurrent players previously held by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Although Fortnite recorded 3.4 million players at one time over the weekend — besting PUBG’s previous mark, 3.2 million — the accomplishment was blemished by repeated server crashes caused by the massive number of players.
“The extreme load caused six different incidents between Saturday and Sunday, with a mix of partial and total service disruptions to Fortnite,” the company wrote. The post goes into some technical details about what caused the various outages, which involved everything from matchmaking, to account retrieval, to instant messaging, to cloud servers being overwhelmed. Basically, they got clobbered.
PC Gamer was quick to point out that the Fortnite count encompasses players on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, while PUBG’s numbers only reflect Steam players. As Epic didn’t break its numbers down by platform, it’s difficult to say who truly has the upper hand.
It’s Epic’s biggest game so far, and the company recently pulled the plug on its free-to-play MOBA Paragon, with many team members moving to Fortnite.
“It’s been an amazing and exhilarating experience to grow Fortnite from our previous peak of 60K concurrent players to 3.4M in just a few months, making it perhaps the biggest PC/console game in the world!” Epic wrote. It appears that some help is needed, however, as the blog post opens and closes with a plea for people with “domain expertise” to apply for a job at the company.
More game updates are planned for the near future, with an earlier post promising 60 FPS for all console versions later this month. Extra servers will also soon be online for West Coast and Brazilian Xbox players. Epic also announced upcoming integration with Facebook and other social networks for friend invites.
Several cosmetic updates are also in the works, with new outfits, gliders, and animations. New weapons and consumables are also mentioned, as well as the promise of different items in future updates.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.