5 years ago, in July 2019, the Fortnite World Cup took place: Looking back, it was the peak of the Fortnite hype in e-sports, but the event left a bitter aftertaste and has not been repeated since. There are serious doubts as to whether some people were right to win their $17 million back then.
What kind of event was that back then?
Why was it such an event back then? Anyone who managed to qualify for the World Championships as a solo or duo received $50,000 in prize money. The top four in the singles became instant millionaires, the eventual winner Bugha even received $3 million in prize money.
But the qualification was tough because millions played Fortnite at the time, but only a handful of players from each region were admitted. Even big Twitch streamers like Ninja, who pulled out all the stops, failed to qualify for the Fortnite World Cup.
In the run-up to the World Cup, Epic Games had lowered the age limit for participation to 13 years and veteran shooter professionals like Ninja, who was in his late 20s at the time, had no chance against the underage competition. The later runner-up, Pslam, was already a Methuselah among the participants at the age of 24.
He came 14th in the duo and 25th in the individual: the Brit Benjyfishy
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Everything revolved around the World Cup and qualification
How could you see the hype? In the run-up to the World Cup, the qualifying tournaments for the World Cup were always played on the weekends. This had an impact on the “beat” of Fortnite:
The qualification process involved players coming into lobbies with “normal” players and having to collect as many points as possible by killing and surviving – a real rush, a hunt for the high score.
People waited for months to see whether their favorite streamer could still qualify for the tournament. The matches were hard and competitive.
Players and spectators binge on Fortnite World Cup and are full afterwards
This was the impact of the event: At first glance, the Fortnite World Cup itself went well. The viewer numbers were decent – e-sports seemed to be entering the mainstream.
But after the World Cup, the air was gone from e-sports: everything had come to a head for this central event worth $30 million, and players and spectators had almost had enough of the months-long Fortnite qualifying games, where everything was on the line played into a burnout and after the Fortnite World Cup the game ran out of steam:
If you look at it positively, you can say: The hype around Fortnite died down in 2019 anyway, but the Fortnite World Cup kept it alive for a while. In any case, the end of the Fortnite World Cup also resulted in a significant drop on Twitch.
This then continued: the number of viewers in e-sports flattened, the prize money shrank and future peaks on Twitch were only achieved by Fortnite with the Seaosn highlights, i.e. the PvE events.
Big doubts about the integrity of the e-sports event in retrospect
That was the sporting problem of the event: What was never really talked about: In retrospect, the format of the tournament turned out to be a huge problem for the sporting integrity of Fortnite, because the winners were determined in matches in which 100 players competed against each other – i.e. the best players in the world. All on one map. Everyone against everyone.
Fortnite was never intended to be an e-sports title, but was hastily launched as a PUBG variant in just a few months: Fortnite is a battle royale game that only offered an e-sport because teams really wanted it in 2018.
The Battle Royale concept is about excitement and show, that anything can happen at any time. The aim is to entertain a streamer’s viewers; the aim has never been to ensure fair competition.
Anyone who has played a battle royale knows how unfair it is when you land and find nothing, but the enemy comes running at you with a shotgun early on.
In e-sports the problems become even more complex.
When 100 people play together on a map: How should you avoid manipulation? How could Epic Games prevent individual players from colluding according to the motto: “We avoid each other for as long as possible so that we can survive for a long time and collect a lot of points.”
There are some indications that something like this happened in the run-up to the Fortnite World Cup: A then 19-year-old coach Hugh Gilmour had looked after a large number of the eventual winners:
According to him, people who were “coached” by him earned $17 million in prize money from the Fortnite World Cup: This is how he trained the players who would later take 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th place in the solo tournament – and also teams 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 in the duos.
These players knew in advance that they would meet each other in battle royale games at the World Cup – and all visited the same coach.
Why is this strange? If a coach trains a large number of the eventual winners, one can speculate that something is not right here and that arrangements have been made about the running paths through this coach.
It would be enough to recommend your players their own “landing points” so that they stay out of each other’s way for as long as possible in the match to give them a significant advantage. Maybe you’ll also tell them where they should continue from the landing point in order to avoid strong opponents for as long as possible: the loot routes.
This part of Fortnite esports history has never been fully explained. Nobody is really interested in taking a closer look, neither Epic Games itself nor the players involved.
Months later, in November 2019, suspicions arose on reddit that the coach “did not help players through training,” but rather by dictating loot routes to them in order to avoid other players.
Even if it never really became a scandal, it stands to reason that Epic Games also had suspicions, because there was never anything like the Fortnite World Cup again.
Fortnite later introduced seemingly strange rules: “Jumping” was banned in 2020 because jumping was used by professionals as a signal: “Don’t hurt me, then I won’t hurt you either.”
Fortnite completely buried the World Cup and never touched the idea again
These are the aftermath of the Fortnite World Cup: To put it bluntly: Maybe the 2020 pandemic was just right for Epic Games, as it gave them a good excuse not to repeat the Fortnite World Cup on site in 2020.
Even when the problems with the corona pandemic subsided, an event like this never came back.
Fortnite esports transitioned to online tournaments starting in 2020 and has never been at this level again.
Many pros from the “golden era” have long since switched games and moved to Valorant. Fortnite has attracted attention through PvE events in recent years, but e-sports are hardly talked about anymore.
Many Fortnite winners at the time changed the game noticeably early or ended their careers straight away:
Fortnite: Austrian became world champion and millionaire at 17 – ended career at 21