Fortnite’s player count has plummeted to its lowest in two years, despite being in the middle of its biggest Star Wars crossover to date.
While other multiplayer games have struggled to keep fans coming back, such as XDefiant or even Call of Duty at times, Fortnite has managed to maintain its popularity for years. Epic’s ever-changing battle royale has enjoyed a healthy player count since it arrived in 2017.
One of the main reasons for this is its ability to reinvent itself with every major update, adding new features and POIs to discover. But as you’d expect in any game that is constantly evolving with new seasons and crossovers, not all eras are as popular as others.
Now, despite being in the middle of a huge Star Wars collaboration, the Fortnite player count is at its lowest point since 2023.
Fortnite player count plummets ahead of Chapter 6 Season 3
According to Fortnite.gg, the game had an average of 1,039,379 players in May 2025. This is the lowest figure seen since May 2023 during Chapter 4 Season 2, when Mega Tokyo was first added to the map as a POI.
Interestingly, the Star Wars season arrived on May 2 and has been active throughout the entire month, with new updates dropping weekly. This is all set to culminate on June 7, when the Death Star Sabotage live event ushers in Chapter 6 Season 3.
While it’d be easy to look at these figures and say that the Star Wars crossover is responsible for the decline, perhaps because it turned off players who aren’t interested in the series, the numbers were actually in decline already.
The start of Chapter 6 brought a spike in the average players, reaching a high of 2,166,185 in December 2024, but ever since, the figures have been slowly falling. By the time Chapter 6 Season 2 arrived in February, it had slipped to 1,550,893, and it had already gone down to 1,133,442 in April, the month before the Star Wars update.
While this will no doubt be a worrying trend for Epic Games, who will be hoping that interest picks back up when Chapter 6 Season 3 drops, it’s worth keeping in mind that these are still healthy numbers by most standards.
Most online multiplayer games would only dream of having over a million average players eight years after launch, so it’s not like the game is on life support.
However, with the next major update set to be another superhero season featuring a number of crossovers, the devs will want the player count to bounce back.
