Since the massive number of hours viewed Fortnite racked up during its World Cup this summer, its Twitch viewership has been on a gradual decline.
It feels as if Fortnite has quickly become so mainstream that it's one of those things that's no longer cool to like and enjoy. In fact, the "in" thing to do right now in regard to Fortnite is complain about it. The overarching theme of Season X has been the backlash against the game's B.R.U.T.E.s, giant mechs against which regular players are relatively powerless.
There was a very bright spot in Fortnite's summer, though: its very first World Cup. Despite cheating and controversy marring much of the qualifying weekends, the finals in New York City went off without a hitch. Plus, the tournament from start to finish was viewed for a collective 80 million hours.
It's pretty impressive, but according to The Esports Observer, it has been downhill since then for Fortnite viewership. During the week ending September 22, 2019, Fortnite was watched for fewer hours than any other week so far in 2019 - 11.7 million hours in total. That might sound like a lot, and it is, but it is the fifth week in a row that Fortnite has seen its total viewing hours drop on Twitch.
There are probably a number of reasons Epic can point to for this gradual drop. For starters, there's a lot of hype surrounding Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare right now. It might not have been released yet, but there are a lot of people streaming the beta and a lot of people who don't have access to it watching on Twitch. The hubbub surrounding World Of Warcraft Classic still hasn't died down either. It sits one place above Fortnite in the hours watched rankings for the week mentioned above.
In the grand scheme of things, Epic doesn't exactly have much to worry about. Other than WoW, the only game being watched for more hours on Twitch right now is League of Legends. Despite the aforementioned hype surrounding CoD, Fortnite is still being watched for an extra five million hours per week. It has a long, long way to go before it drops out of that top ten.
Source: The Esports Observer