After Fortnite Battle Royale announced their competitive free-for-all solo event, players from all around the world played the game throughout the week for a chance to prove their skills by scoring as highly as possible in their first 50 games. While the event came to a close in May 21, the results were released sometime around May 24.

The 1^st place winner

Epic Games updated their final standings in May 25, which only served to further cement the status of the player who was topping the leaderboard. The person goes by the gamer handle “vRxthless” who had a score of 4881. The second place goes to a person with gamer handle “Zayt”, he was only 26 points behind at 4855 points, keeping us glued to the edge of our seats.

The difference between the 100^th spot and 1^st spot was a massive 267 points, but it still goes to show just how competitive the game became from the 100^th spot onward.

After snagging the top spot, vRxthless has won 50,000 V-Bucks, which is known as the internal currency of Fortnite, the prize is valued at $500. Fortnite will also be giving $1000 worth of V-Bucks to all players who ranked in the top 100. Gamers who managed to play 50 games in the “Solow Showdown” mode will be able to receive a free spray.

The success of Solo Showdown doesn’t seem to have been confined to just a single week of hard work. Epic Games revealed in a blog post that they will be providing $100,000,000 to “fund prize pools for Fortnite Competitions” between the year 2018 and 2019. Although the blog post didn’t fully disclose the details about the nature of the competitions and or eligible platforms, it still serves as the first major announcement about Fortnite’s plans on making their debut in the competitive play scene since their launch last year.

Furthermore, the competition would be ranked according to the player’s skill set, which is likely their precursor toward potentially dominating the esport industry.

The value of the Esport industry

Data released from Newzoo has shown that the esports industry has grown significantly this year. Revenues in 2018 will experience an increase of 38% from 2017’s $655 million. Newzoo further believes that the esports industry will cross the billion dollar mark in 2019, with revenues expected to hit $1.1 billion.

All these milestones can be attributed to many new developments made in 2018, League of Legends has been as popular as it was before, their 2017 World Championship finals saw the number of unique viewers increase by over two folds! Meanwhile Activision Blizzard reported that their streams saw more than 10 million unique visitors with an average audience of over 280,000 viewers every minute. Even big industries from the likes of telecommunication and automobile industry are lending their support to the Esports industry in the form of sponsorships. Together, these are the driving factors behind the growth of revenues.