Dorothy had no idea how long she'd been playing Fortnite.
All she knew was that she'd played from daylight straight into the night.
Normally, her daily streaming time was about eight hours—basically a regular workday—and she'd long since gotten used to that rhythm.
But once she started playing Fortnite, she completely lost track of time.
Every match, Dorothy always seemed to be just this close to winning it all.
That frustrated her.
She couldn't quite understand it herself—she'd never been a particularly competitive person.
If she really loved winning that much, she probably wouldn't have stayed lukewarm and unnoticed for so many years.
Yet in this game, getting first place felt like an obsession.
The more she failed to win, the more desperately she wanted it.
And before long, even the viewers in her livestream began to crave seeing Dorothy take first place.
It spread like an infection.
Once viewers grew impatient—thinking "I could do better than that"—they'd head straight to the Battle.net platform, find Fortnite, and try it themselves.
At this moment, the number of players flooding into Fortnite began to rise rapidly.
Most of them came from watching streams, feeling that the streamers were honestly kind of bad—often getting eliminated due to small, obvious mistakes.
But from a god's-eye view, the audience felt those mistakes were downright stupid.
The worse the streamer messed up, the more convinced viewers became that they wouldn't make the same mistakes.
And there was only one way to prove it.
Download the game and show their skill.
This kind of viral spread through livestreaming was incredibly fast.
On the third day after launch, Fortnite's concurrent online player count began to skyrocket.
Before that, peak concurrency was under ten thousand.
Out of those, over a thousand were streamers of varying sizes.
The rest were bored players trying a free game just for fun.
But starting on day three, the situation changed rapidly.
Day 3 concurrent players: 30,000
Day 4 concurrent players: 100,000
Day 5 concurrent players: 190,000
Every day, concurrency jumped by tens of thousands.
And with livestreams amplifying the effect, the growth rate only accelerated.
One week later, concurrent players reached 500,000.
That was simultaneous online users, not total registered players.
Actual registered players were far higher.
Inside Morgan Group's server division, monitoring staff were carrying out their daily maintenance and observation routines.
Under normal circumstances, server maintenance teams were relatively small.
But two days earlier, dozens of additional personnel had suddenly been dispatched.
An airborne team, dedicated solely to maintaining server stability.
At first, the existing staff didn't understand why these people had suddenly shown up.
It didn't take long for them to find out.
A game had rented their servers.
And not just any servers—the best ones.
Apparently, it was a game made by a new company founded by the former CEO.
The current CEO, naturally, had to give some face.
That alone wouldn't normally mean special treatment.
But once the current CEO learned who Lorenzo's partner was, his attitude did a complete 180.
Top-tier servers.
Top-tier service.
No one really understood why.
Most people still thought "Nintendo Is Freaking the Ruler of the World" was just an indie game creator.
They never connected him with Takayuki.
At first, the original staff thought dedicating an entire team to a single game was overkill.
Just an indie creator's new project.
A game made in only three months—how good could it really be?
But a week later, their attitude completely changed.
Because they were hooked too.
The game had a kind of magic.
They'd originally thought it was simple—play carefully and you'd win.
But reality proved otherwise.
Camping might get you into the top twenty, maybe even top ten.
But camping your way to first place was basically winning the lottery.
Yet when you did win that way, the sense of accomplishment was unmatched.
And with countless streamers as contrast, players who won felt that streamers' skills weren't all that impressive after all.
Meanwhile, players who hadn't won yet would throw themselves into match after match, desperate for that first victory.
The rewards for first place weren't actually that much higher than other rankings.
But first place just felt different.
Like you walked with the wind at your back.
These server staff—now players themselves—could feel the game's pull firsthand, both from their addiction and from the server metrics in front of them.
Five hundred thousand concurrent users in one week.
How far could this go?
No wonder extra personnel had been deployed to keep servers stable.
If something went wrong with servers at this scale, it would be a serious incident.
This massive data throughput was exactly what Morgan Group dreamed of.
Which meant one thing.
Money.
A lot of money.
At first, service had been given out of respect for the former CEO.
Now?
If Morgan didn't provide the best service, Nintendo could easily move elsewhere.
And that was unacceptable.
Spitting out meat that was already in your mouth was worse than never having eaten it at all.
Stable servers, an addictive game, and soaring concurrency—
The higher the player count, the better matchmaking could balance skill levels.
That created a positive feedback loop.
"Five hundred thousand… it's actually… five hundred thousand."
Inside Nintendo's office, programmer Marcus stared blankly at the giant screen.
It displayed the real-time concurrent player count.
The data came directly from Morgan's server division.
"Yes! That's amazing!"
Nearby, one of Marcus's colleagues leapt up from his desk, cheering and waving his arms.
Marcus felt a deep sense of satisfaction too.
He'd never imagined the game could achieve results like this.
Even top-tier companies would feel embarrassed standing next to numbers like these.
"Excellent. Thank you all for your hard work," Takayuki said."Without everyone's efforts, this game wouldn't be where it is today. Tonight, we'll hold a celebration here in the office—celebrating 500,000 concurrent players. Next, we'll celebrate one million, two million, three million, maybe even four million."
In Takayuki's memory, both Fortnite and PUBG had once reached three million concurrent players.
At this pace, three million was clearly within reach.
Even four or five million wasn't impossible.
After all, right now, this game had virtually no competitors.