Few games in history have made as big of an impact on the gaming industry as Fortnite and Minecraft. Both games have nearly unfathomably large player bases and continue to entice more and more players to their platforms. In this article, we will attempt to answer if Minecraft has more players than Fortnite at the moment. Please note that all figures and conclusions here are estimates and any information not cited from a source is pure speculation.
Does Minecraft Have More Players than Fortnite
The short answer, not yet. While it would be impossible at this point to give any definitive figures, it looks as though Fortnite at the moment has considerably more monthly active users than Minecraft. However, Minecraft is on a steady uptrend while Fortnite is starting a slow downtrend.
With the lack of any real-time player data for either Minecraft or Fortnite, we are left to play some detective work by piecing together player counts from various reports over time. Few reports overlap in the current timeframe, so we can try and estimate the player counts for a similar time in the past and then assume the future based on the current game trends.
A good timeframe to start with would be August 2020. This is the last time we had reliable data on Fortnite player counts due to them being exposed during the Epic vs. Apple Lawsuit. In the case documents, it was said that in August 2020 Fortnite achieved an impressive 25 Million DAU (Daily Active Users). With the industry-wide average of MAU (Monthly Active Users) being about 10x higher than DAU we can make a fairly good assumption that in August 2020, Fortnite had around 250 Million monthly active users.
Jumping over to Minecraft, we have some MAU statistics for May 2020 and March 2021. Showing that in May 2020, Minecraft had roughly 126 Million MAU and 140 Million in March. We can follow the trend between these two dates and say that in August 2020, Minecraft likely had around 129 Million monthly active users.
A more recent date confirms that Minecraft is currently sitting around the 141 Million monthly active users mark as of August of this year. Although there is no reliable recent user data on Fortnite, it is probably safe to say that the MAU has not dropped over 100 million users to go below Minecraft over the last year. That would be an over 40% drop in the player base and would have made major news in the gaming circuit.
We can use some Google Trend data over the past year to get a better look at where the games are headed. While the amplitude of the graph below can be a bit deceiving what’s more important is the direction of the trends over time. You can see that over the last few months Fortnite has stagnated a bit and started to dip, while Minecraft is picking up the pace.
So at the moment, we can say with general certainty that on at least a monthly basis, Minecraft does not have more players than Fortnite. However, given the current trends that may not be the case in a year or two from now. Although not always reliable, player tracking sites seem to confirm this, showing a month-to-month net loss in the player count for Fortnite and a net gain for Minecraft.
We will update this report as more concrete information gets released on player counts in the future. Different events such as the release of Fornite Chapter 3 will obviously skew the figures but will be more focused on the big picture long term.
