Report: Players' Interest In Battle Royale Genre Keeps Decreasing & Fortnite Has Seen Dominant Share

The Battle Royale genre, once highly popular in the gaming industry, has been losing players' interest over the past four years. However, amidst this downgrading, Epic Games' Fortnite has enjoyed a great increase in share. 

A new industry report from Newzoo, based on the platform's Game Performance Monitor data from 37 markets, covers the PC and console gaming situation in 2024. It shows that from 2021 to 2024, the percentage of Battle Royale in playtime has been continuously decreasing, dropping from 19% to 12%. The once-second-biggest genre has now been surpassed by RPG, while the playtime in shooters has steadily increased from 22% to 28%. 

One thing to notice is that although overall playtime in the genre has decreased, Fortnite has remained robust as its share has seen a huge increase. It took a dominant position with 77% of all playtime in 2024, compared to 43% in 2021.

On consoles specifically, Fortnite alone accounted for 13.8% of total hours on PlayStation in the past year, and it also leads on Xbox with the number being 12.5%

Meanwhile, this nearly eight-year-old game, along with Marvel Rivals and Roblox, contributed to the accelerated growth of free-to-play games in regards to playtime as they managed to gain share from existing incumbents.