Pushing Buttons: Why Fortnite is suddenly the most popular game in the world once more

Over the weekend, almost 45 million people returned to Fortnite. The beginning of the battle royale shooter’s’s “OG” event saw the map restored to its 2018 state, back before the entire in-game island was memorably sucked into a black hole. Those people played for a combined 102m hours in a single day, an all-time record, according to developer Epic Games. Not bad for a game that has been available for more than six years, and been a topic of playground conversation for half a decade.

Firstly: 44.7 million people! That’s 10 times the number who watched the premiere of The Last of Us, and more people than have ever bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s reductive to look at video games purely through the lens of player numbers and revenue – to me it’s the least interesting thing a number.