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Fortnite tallied almost $300 million in April, with no signs of slowing down

The money keeps rolling in for Epic Games' battle royale shooter, which doubled its revenue in just two months.

Jason Parker Senior Editor / Reviews - Software
Jason Parker has been at CNET for nearly 15 years. He is the senior editor in charge of iOS software and has become an expert reviewer of the software that runs on each new Apple device. He now spends most of his time covering Apple iOS releases and third-party apps.
Jason Parker
2 min read

Epic Games' Fortnite tallied $296 million in revenue for the month of April according to SuperData, a company that follows digital game sales. That's a pretty amazing number considering you can download and play the game for free. But if you're one of many people playing, it's probably not that much of a surprise.

Fortnite's free-to-play model avoids many of the potholes that have damaged previous multiplayer titles like Star Wars: Battlefront II. It doesn't let you buy your way to victory or gain any advantage over other players; instead it offers cosmetic items that let players show off to their friends and opponents. Cool-looking outfits, silly emotes, item skins and dance moves rotate through the in-game store every day, waiting for players to pay a little money simply for bragging rights.

Even if players avoid buying items individually in the store, the game lets you spend $9.99 for what it calls the Battlepass, a tiered system of rewards you can slowly unlock by completing challenges while playing the game. You won't get all the same stuff you find in the store, but with a little patience you can get several skins, emotes and dance moves and even some Battlepass exclusive items. In other words, the game has plenty of ways to take players' money and people are so far perfectly happy to spend it.

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By completing challenges in game, you can slowly unlock tiers to get rewards.

Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET

Epic Games' reported revenue for April is nearly double what it rung up in February, when it passed up PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) and became the biggest free-to-play console game of all time

Amazingly, even with nearly $300 million coming in, that number is likely to rise in the coming months. Epic Games already announced that Fortnite would be coming to Android this summer, adding a huge audience to a game that's already being played on the PS4, Xbox One , Windows and Mac PCs, and iPhones . And Epic also plans to invest $100 million in expanding the games' presence in the competitive esports market.