CARY – If anything else was needed to point out the pop culture succcess of Fortnite, the news surrounding its “black hole” outage and reaction to its “Chapter 2” provides proof.
As Epic Games sent its global hit “Fortnite” into a cyber black hole on Sunday, players reacted in some interesting ways from staring at the blank streaming feed to searching for porn. Turns out the outage was the most popular event of the year for the game. And when the game returned early Tuesday with “Chapter 2,” the reaction included a query from pop culture phenom Lady Gaga.
“What’s Fortnite?” wrote the superstar in a Tweet.
She received a horde of responses – some kind, others declarative such as the official account for Twitter Gaming: “It’s the ARTPOP of video games.” That comment references Gaga’s third studio album, Fox News notes.
But the porn requests …. here’s more about that.
Reviewing Fortnite’s new chapter: A veteran gamer sees it as ‘a new beginning’
Seems searches for “black hole” pornography soared more than 9,000 percent while Fortnite was offline, according to The Sun in the United Kingdom.
“Some of those searches even contained the words ‘fortnite black hole,'” The Sun reports, citing data from Pornhub which tracks such things.
Quartz, meanwhile, says the lengthy outage of some 36 hours was the most popular event of 2019 for Epic’s game, which has generated more than 200 million users and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for the privately held Cary company. (It’s now worth billions, and founder/CEO Tim Sweeney is a billionaire, according to various reports.)
“The nearly two-day blackout ended up being the most widely-watched Fortnite event of the year on the streaming service Twitch,” Quartz says.
“According to Twitch analytics platform SullyGnome, a peak of more than 1.6 million viewers watched Fortnite channels on Sunday, more than any point in the last year. That figure is likely higher than reported, since so many curious players ended up tuning in that they crashed Twitch’s website, a representative from SullyGnome told Quartz.”
Fortnite’s back: ‘Chapter 2’ launches with many changes after black hole absence ends
