Many people think that Fortnite is a poor man’s PUBG because the game is free to play, but we have some stats to prove that this is very far from true.
In fact, the average money spent on Fortnite per player far exceeds the retail price for PUBG, which would suggest that Fortnite players are actually spending more than PUBG players.
Here is a look at the stats that show just how many Fortnite players are throwing their money at the screen whenever Epic Games launches new skins.
69% of Fortnite Players Spend Money On the Game
A recent study done on 1,000 Fortnite players revealed that 69% of them have spent money on the game. This obviously doesn’t perfectly represent the entire Fortnite player base, but it shows that it is likely that the majority of Fortnite players do spend money on the game, despite it being free to play.
What’s more interesting is the amount of money that was being spent on Fortnite. If you just look at those that spent money on the game, the average money spent was $84.67. That’s almost three times more than PUBG’s $29.99 retail price.
If you include those that don’t spend money on Fortnite into the mix, the average spent per player drops to $58.25. This number is still close to twice what PUBG players spend to get the game.
This doesn’t account for the amount PUBG players spend on cosmetics, case keys, and event passes, but it does show that the whole ‘Fortnite is a poor man’s PUBG’ statement is completely false.
Fortnite Spending Stats Explained
The study that we’re basing this information on also provides some details on what people are actually spending their money on in-game.
According to the study, the majority of purchases (58.9%) were on new skins. 18% of purchases were on gliders, 13.5% on harvesting tools, and 9.5% on emotes.
What’s crazy is that more than a third of players in the study (36.7%) say that this is the first time they’ve ever bought anything in a game. Those sweet, sweet skins must be just too alluring.
Out of all people in the study that spent money on Fortnite, 79.5% of them purchased a Battle Pass, and a surprising 45.6% of people purchased the 2,800 V-Bucks Battle Bundle.
What’s more shocking is that 35% of students said that they missed school to play Fortnite and 20.5% of workers said they missed work. The majority of players in the study said that they played Fortnite for at least 10 hours per week.
Why Is Fortnite So Popular?
You may be wondering why Fortnite has become so successful. Perhaps by chance, Fortnite became incredibly popular through viral media.
Popular YouTubers started sharing videos about it, news channels started reporting on it, and somebody in nearly every workplace or school probably made conversation about it.
Fortnite is a good game, undoubtedly, but the viral power of the internet is certainly what helped Fortnite to reach such large success. It could have been any game, but it ended up being Fortnite.
It also helps that Fortnite is so accessible. It’s a free, bright and colorful game that is fairly straightforward to get to grips with. This means that many people that never really played these kinds of games before have started playing video games because of Fortnite.
When you start to get good at Fortnite, it also becomes very addictive. Battle royale games up the ante a ton because there can only be one winning player or team per match, out of dozens.
Getting that victory royale is always exciting and it takes countless wins before you can fight it out amongst the last remaining players without an elevated heartbeat.
Compare this to your average shooter like Battlefield or Call of Duty. In these games, winning isn’t as exciting. You usually respawn when you die so there’s little risk to dying and the player count is far smaller, so winning is much more achievable.
In shooter games, you’re sort of fed kills periodically, which gives slight satisfaction over time, but this gets boring quickly. In battle royale games like Fortnite, getting multiple kills per match is always challenging.
How Fortnite Beat PUBG
Before Fortnite battle royale even landed, PUBG was killing it. It received over 3,000,000 peak concurrent players per day at its prime and nobody had ever seen anything like it on Steam before.
The second highest played game at Steam at the time was Dota 2, a free to play MOBA that reached 1.2 million concurrent users at its peak, but usually gets around 600,000.
But it wasn’t long before Fortnite essentially stole PUBG’s steam, so to speak. PUBG tapered away a little bit, and Fortnite has been in the spotlight ever since.
PUBG is far from dead, of course – it still gets 1.2 million peak concurrent players every day, which is still very impressive.
Unfortunately for PUBG Corp., Epic Games has pretty much outplayed them with Fortnite in every way possible.
Firstly, the accessibility helps a lot. Fortnite is free and more optimized. This immediately brings in far more players than PUBG does.
But it’s not just that. Epic Games has perfected content delivery and microtransactions. Epic Games is constantly looking to add fun new limited time modes, new weapons, and new areas of the map.
New cosmetics are also added regularly, and the game world kind of evolves over time. The season system has also done very well for Fortnite. Each season, massive new changes are brought to the map and new gameplay features are added to keep things interesting.
PUBG feels very stale in comparison. In PUBG, we’ve only really had two new maps, a variety of new weapons, and cosmetics that feel very boring in comparison to what Fortnite has to offer. PUBG’s limited events are also shoddily put together and overall it just feels like PUBG Corp. has less of an idea about what to do to keep players interested.
Whoever is in charge of Fortnite’s future content releases deserves a huge pat on the back. If somebody like that could join the PUBG Corp. team, I think the games would still be neck and neck.
What are your thoughts on this whole thing? Have you spent money on Fortnite, and if so, how much?