Fortnite and PUBG start 2018 amid a continued fight for living room supremacy amongst Battle Royale fans on PS4 and Xbox One.
Epic Games previously revealed during the Game Awards in December 2017 that Fortnite had hit huge a huge milestone, with 30million players in total.
Fortnite also hit 1.3million concurrent users during the first weekend of December 2017.
And now the hit online game has passed another major milestone, with Epic Games revealing today that Fortnite has hit over 40million players.
This past weekend Fortnite also hit a new record for concurrent users, with two million gamers all playing at the same time.
Speaking to Express.co.uk, Eric Williamson, Lead Systems Designer for Fortnite, said: “We’re really excited to announce we’re at more than 40 million Fortnite players. It’s incredible.
“We just announced 30 million back in December, so reach this new milestone so quickly is really just so amazing and unexpected.
“Having only launched Battle Royale in September and then to see that we’re the top played game on Xbox One, for example, and hear people saying that it might be the most popular battle royale game in the Western world is really amazing.”
Eric added that the Fortnite team are planning to continue 2018 where they left 2017 off, growing the player base and regularly adding more content.
He said: “With so many players and seeing the game growing, we’re not going to take our foot off the gas.
“We have so much in store for players in 2018; we’re just going to keep listening and adding new content all of the time.”
The latest Fortnite numbers comes after PUBG revealed players stats for the PC and recently released Xbox One versions at the end of December.
On December 21 2017 it was revealed PUBG had over 30million players across both PC and Xbox One.
PUBG hit that landmark in less than a year, which is a similar adoption rate to other online heavyweights.
Overwatch hit 30million players after around 11 months on sale, while the original Destiny reached 20million players after eights months availability.
PUBG has been a huge hit on Xbox One since it was released in December, so we’re expected that 30million player count will have gone up by now.
And the other major factor between PUBG and Fortnite is PUBG is a paid-for game – whereas Fortnite Battle Royale is free-to-play.
If you want to play the regular Fortnite mode right now, you’ll have to pay for it – but it will become completely free later this year.
The news comes after a new Fortnite update was rolled out to Battle Royale fans which added the Campfire Trap.
The new Cozy Campfire Trap includes a range of buff for anyone who can collect and deploy it safely on the island.
The new healing trap must be placed on a floor and persists for 25 seconds, before providing 2 HP per second.
It should also be noted that the new item is of Blue rarity and can be found anywhere.
The new Fortnite update was launched on January 10 for PS4 and Xbox One.
Fortnite fans also saw a range of big bug fixes in the patch, as well as the introduction of ShadowPlay Highlights from NVIDIA.
“No longer will your friends have to “take your word” when you tell them about that mountain sliding snipe headshot,” a message from Epic reads.
“ShadowPlay will save plays automatically by default. You are also able to manually configure which plays get saved and customize it to fit your style.
“NVIDIA ShadowPlay Highlights is supported for all PC gamers using GeForce GTX 650 and above graphics cards.”