Fortnite‘s competitions so far have largely been focused on the battle royale mode of the game, with it being the most popular mode since its release. However, as the game has grown and evolved over time, there’s a case to be made that Epic Games could diversify its Competitive matches to also include formats outside of the BR format.
Internet personality MrBeast recently hosted a one million dollar competition inside Fortnite. While this would be in line with previous Fortnite Competitive tournaments, MrBeast hosted the competition inside his own Creative level, MrBeast’s Extreme Survival Challenge, this past Saturday, Dec. 17.
The competition was simple enough, with the player who could get the highest score on the level at the end of a round being crowned the winner and receiving the million dollars sometime in 2023. The Extreme Survival Challenge leaderboard changed significantly throughout the day, with Guild Anas largely keeping the lead in the last 2 hours of the competition with over 142,000 points.
Regardless, this competition was played by around 29,000 people at its peak, according to the FortniteTracker tool. In comparison, the same tool has the Europe Placement Cup Session One at around 33,000. If a game mode that was created specifically for an internet celebrity can do nearly as well as the official Competitive mode, there may be something there.
At a certain skill level, the Fortnite Competitive scene is a revolving door of the same players every year until they inevitably step away from the game. While this is great for esports entertainment, it doesn’t provide many opportunities for the average player.
That’s what was kind of exciting about this new competition from MrBeast. Everyone thought they had a fair chance of winning and that made the actual competition more exciting to play and watch. Many of the names featured at the top of the leaderboard were unknown players, even if the prize will seemingly go to an established esports player that was at the 2022 FNCS Invitational.
Providing more opportunities like this in Fortnite‘s Creative mode is a great way for Epic to shake up the Competitive formula and give their average players an opportunity to earn something. While it doesn’t have to, nor could it, replace the current Competitive battle royale format, it’s one of the first new and exciting things that Fortnite Competitive has done in a while, and it deserves further exploring.
While this will likely become more of an option when Fortnite Creative 2.0 launches, it’s still something that deserves to be considered moving forward. It was unique and exciting and almost felt like a live game show at times, with players on social media discussing the event as it was happening, creating a good amount of buzz not usually seen for non-FNCS Competitive events.
If Epic does any more events like this in Creative, it’s likely that the prize pool will be considerably less next time. Even still, it could become a new asset as Epic works to continuously evolve the way it handles its game modes.
