After a slow start to Chapter 7 in December, Fortnite has had a significant bump in its player count since the start of Season 3 in early June. The average number of concurrent players in Battle Royale nearly doubled month over month, going from 228,000 in May to over 433,000 in June, according to public data that was collected and aggregated by fortnite.gg. It appears as though Battle Royale’s new brainrot-inspired sprite-collection gameplay is working about as well as Epic could have hoped, because that’s pretty similar to the bump we saw for Fortnite’s Simpsons-themed season last November, when the average player count jumped from 225,000 to 480,000.
While a bit smaller, the bump in Season 3 is arguably more impressive than the one brought by the month-long Simpsons season, because this one didn’t come with the help of any sort of collaboration with an ultra-famous IP. The player count boost in Season 3 is almost certainly thanks to the addition of the collection-and-extraction mechanic with the sprite creatures, which have proven to be quite a hook for sweats and casuals alike.
And the weekend Power Hours, which have offered players extra chances to find rare sprite variants, have inspired peaks in the player count that are usually reserved for live events–June 27’s “gummy hour” saw nearly 1.6 million players in Battle Royale at once.
While the jump in the player count for Season 3 has been nice, it’s also a warning. The increased player count for Simpsons season didn’t last–in fact, the player count went down when Chapter 7 started, indicating that Fortnite wasn’t able to keep the new folks it had drawn in. Epic faces a similar situation with the upcoming transition from Season 3 to Season 4, which will launch in late August. Can Epic figure out how to keep this influx of players when the next season starts with, presumably, its own new gimmick?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because it can be feast-or-famine with Fortnite’s seasonal gimmicks. One of the reasons that last year’s Simpsons season was able to boost the player count so significantly was because the season before, Chapter 6 Season 4 with its bug invasion gimmick, brought Battle Royale’s player count to its lowest recorded average ever in September 2025 (though we should note that Fortnite only began offering this data publicly in 2023). And then, two months after Simpsons season ended, Battle Royale’s player numbers fell back down to the same sorts of lows we’d seen just prior to the Simpsons takeover. Epic has a tall task ahead of it if it wants to prevent history from repeating itself.
