Summary
The CEO ofEpic Games, Tim Sweeney, has explained in a recent interview whyFortnite’s Battle Royale mode has a 100-player limit and how that might be changed in the future.
Ever since the launch of PUBG, the Battle Royale genre has beenone of gaming’s most popular and something that nearly everyone has been trying to get in on. Althoughthere are variants here and there, most Battle Royale games follow the same formula - up to 100 players drop into an expansive map andhave to scavenge around the map for as long as possible until only one player is left standing.
That formula has become very tried and true over the last few years, and it’s one that Fortnite has continued to stick to in its main Battle Royale mode. While 100 players trying to battle it out on one map certainly makes for an exciting time, it seems that Epic was once trying to figure out how to raise that count even further.
Fortnite CEO Says 100-Player Battle Royale Limit Is Because Of Slow Data Centres
As highlighted by Twitter user and reliable Fortnite insider HYPEX, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeneyrecently took part in an interview with Matthew Ballthat discussed the definition of “Metaverse” and the future of Fortnite. At one point during the interview, Ball asks Sweeney how he thinks Fortnite has changed as it approaches its seven-year anniversary, and what might happen another seven years from now.
In response, Sweeney says that Fortnite is going to change a lot in the future, noting that the current version of the game suffers from “artifacts of the limitations of the current technology”. To this point, Sweeney says that the reason why Fortnite only has 100 players in its Battle Royale mode is because Epic’s data centers were too slow for 200 players at launch.
“Why is Fortnite: Battle Royale 100 players? Well, because at the time we launched it we couldn’t make 200 players work on a server. Computers in the data center were just too slow.”
Although 100 player matches are pretty much the norm for Battle Royales anyway, it seems that Fortnite might eventually increase that limit, as Sweeney goes on to note that most of the things you see in the game are not “the permanent end state of what we see this medium being” and that he expects significant changes in the future.
With 200 player matches being called out by Sweeney, it seems that Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode might eventually double its player count. It’s made clear in the interview that this is dependent on technology and Epic’s capabilities, so don’t go holding your breath for such massive matches any time soon.
