The smashing success of Epic Game's new cultural phenomenon, Fortnite, is no small secret, but the extent of that success never ceases to be absolutely mind-blowing. In fact, Fortnite apparently earned more than 5 billion views on YouTube in April alone.

The report comes via Matchmade, a website dedicated to analyzing the statistics behind YouTube videos and growing channels, which also found that a whopping 33,000 videos had been made about Fortnite in April. When combined with March, Fortnite earned 9.7 billion views, a 94% increase over the combined numbers of January and February. This makes Fortnite the most watched game on YouTube by a healthy margin, with Minecraft coming in second place totaling around 2.4 billion views.

According to Matchmade, this means that Fortnite is earning nearly 10 times the amount of views of its biggest competitor, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, whose parent company filed a lawsuit against Epic Games for copyright infringement a few days ago. During the same period, PUBG only pulled in 553 million views, an impressive number on its own, but nearly nothing when compared to Fortnite.

This level of viewership is no small feat. It not only demonstrates the way in which the games industry is maturing into more of a mainstream past time but has interesting implications for the future of entertainment in general. More and more people, especially gamers, are turning to platforms like Twitch and YouTube for their entertainment as opposed to traditional avenues like a cable subscription.

Epic is well-deserving of this level of success for their survival game turned battle royale goliath. They've managed to regularly run community events and steadily introduce new content while maintaining a free-to-play business model and engaging their player base with cryptic puzzles. It also helps that they have a healthy dose of internet personality, such as the rapidly growing Twitch streamer, Ninja, backing their title and regularly uploading new content to keep their viewers hooked on the game. How long the success will last remains to be seen- after all fads come and go, especially in the era of an everchanging internet landscape and the ability of nearly anything to explode overnight.

Fortnite is available now on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Mobile.

Source: Matchmade