Will there be a Fortnite World Cup in 2022?

Three years ago, the Fortnite World Cup was held. Since then, it has been pretty quiet around Fortnite esports. Yet rumors are surfacing that this year we will be able to enjoy another wonderful event where tens of millions are at stake. Time to find out how that works.

One hundred million dollars, that's how much money was at stake in the Fortnite esports scene in 2019, with as dessert the world championship where no less than thirty million dollars were at stake. Epic Games wanted to break records and to a large extent they succeeded. The first season of Fortnite esports seemed a success, but was it?

Epic Games itself called the world championship a „tournament that set the new standard. With 19,000 fans on location and 2.3 million fans sitting in front of their television or monitor at home, the audience was huge. In fact, according to Epic Games itself, it was a record number of viewers. After the world championship, Epic Games teased Fortnite Season X, a new competition entirely for esports fans, but nothing has come of it (yet).

Despite the fact that little has happened to Fortnite's esports scene since 2019, there is an explanation. The 2020 and 2021 World Championships were cancelled due to corona. Leagues were set up, but they never received much attention.

Organizations that wanted to organize tournaments did get clarity. For example, word came from tournament organizer Elite Esports that no on-site Fortnite events may be held until the second quarter of 2022. That second quarter started last April, nevertheless the Fortnite Championship Series: Chapter 3 Season 2 finals were held online. Pretty strange since those were hefty tournaments with a total prize pool of three million dollars.

Costs

Everyone knows that Fortnite brings in a lot of money. The game has been wildly popular for years; it has hundreds of millions of users and has a turnover of billions of dollars per year. How much revenue it turned in 2021 is not yet known, but in 2020 it was over five billion dollars, a big increase from 2019 (3.7 billion dollars) which is probably due in part to corona. The 2021 figures are also expected to be very high.

However, this is about Fortnite the game, not Fortnite the esport. That financial picture, in fact, is a lot less rosy. In the lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, it turned out that Fortnite performed a lot worse than expected in 2019. The expectation was 154 million higher than actually earned, a major setback for Epic Games. How exactly this happened has not been explained, but it is of course telling that since then little attention has been paid to the competitive side of Fortnite.

Esport DNA

Players need not fear, however, that Epic Games will do nothing with competitive Fortnite. After all, the developer has esports DNA in its blood. It made the hyper-competitive shooter Unreal Tournament, developed the (now cancelled) MOBA Paragon with esports in mind and last year bought Psyonix, the studio behind Rocket League, a game with a gigantically active esports scene.

In addition, of course, there are just leagues going on. The Fortnite Championship Series (FNCS), for example, is still running at full speed. A physical tournament, the FNCS Invitational, was recently announced, which will be held on November 12 and 13 in Raleigh, USA. During that event for duos, one million dollars is at stake.

So there is a tournament planned anyway, but the FNCS Invitational is not a world championship. It is a duos tournament with a prize pool that is a lot lower than we are used to from Epic Games. So a world championship in the summer is certainly not out of the question.

The biggest hint for that possible world championship comes from Aussie Antics, a content creator at NRG Esports. He tweeted in late April that a Fortnite event is coming up with a prize pool of fifteen million dollars. That amount may be lower than in 2019, but outside of The International, there is no tournament that can match that.

Aussie Antics indicates in its video that it has little information, but the bottom line is that an event for the charity Gamers without Borders will be held in Saudi Arabia, but that in addition, a major esports event will take place which is a qualifying tournament for the World Championship. The latter tournament would in turn have that hefty prize pool. Aussie Antics has not said anything about a date.

With any luck, Fortnite fans will have a great summer and can finally start enjoying a fat World Cup again. And fair is fair, it's about time too. So hurry up Epic, announce that tournament!