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According to a new report from game industry research firm Newzoo, interest in the battle royale genre is on a downward slope.
That might seem like a counterintuitive observation when Fortnite, Warzone, PUBG, and Apex Legends are still huge games, but it probably has more to do with their competitors calling it quits. According to Newzoo’s Game Performance Monitor (which includes official and estimated data from 37 markets excluding China and India), battle royales ate up 19% of total hours played in 2021 but just 12% in 2023 and 2024.
People aren’t playing battle royales as much as they did a few years ago, but interestingly, Fortnite’s share of that playtime has exploded from 43% in 2021 to 77% in 2024. That makes sense when you consider that Fortnite got a big player boost from its Fortnite OG event in 2023 and quickly followed that up by expanding into non-battle royale spinoffs played inside Fortnite, like Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival. Presumably, Newzoo is lumping all of Fortnite’s audience into its share of the battle royale genre, not just those actually playing the battle royale modes.
It’s also true that most battle royale games that launched between 2020 and 2024 have gone offline (RIP Bloodhunt), and we don’t often see new ones these days. The effort that developers used to put toward their spins on battle royales has recently been diverted toward making the next great extraction shooter—a newer subgenre of shooters that’s yet to truly break out beyond Escape From Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown. Maybe Bungie’s Marathon or Embark’s Arc Raiders will be big enough that the 2026 Newzoo report will have its own “extraction shooter” genre slice?
What did people play with those 6% of hours that used to go toward battle royales? Shooters and RPGs. That’s more-or-less consistent with 2024 being a bigger-than-usual year for Call of Duty (thanks to Game Pass), breakout hits like Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals, and the year’s impressive run of action RPGs.
Although, if you lump battle royales into a unified shooter clump, a more consistent trend emerges. As the report points out, shooters as a whole have represented 40% of playtime every year since 2021.
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Kurt Indovina
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