"Hurry up, hurry up—Season Two of Fortnite is live! There are tons of new modes!"
In one place, a group of players excitedly gathered together. Some were holding the latest Facebook smartphones, some had their laptops, and one guy had even hauled over his desktop PC.
They'd made plans to get together today just to play Fortnite.
Recently, Fortnite's popularity had only been climbing higher and higher. By the time the third month rolled around, total registered users across the entire internet had already surpassed thirty million, and concurrent players had reached seven digits.
Most game companies, at this point, would have started living off past success—doubling down on battle royale and nothing else.
But Fortnite was different.
Judging by the way it was going, it looked like it wanted to sweep every competing shooter on the market into one big net.
Everything at Once
All kinds of competitive modes were dumped into the new season in one go:
Team-based combat
Free-for-all chaos
Artifact battles
From hardcore competitive matches to casual, party-style fun—everything was there.
These weren't half-baked ideas either. The team had spent another two to three months building all of this.
At the same time, Fortnite also published its one-year update roadmap.
Every season would feature:
New crossover content
New story modes
Seasonal changes to the main map
Right now, the group that had gathered ranged in age from nine years old to thirty-seven.
Thanks to the game's cartoon art style and the complete absence of blood or gore, its age rating effectively dropped to seven years old and up.
Waiting for the Update
"Are you guys done updating yet? Mine's so slow."
"Phones are always slower. Don't worry—we'll play together once it's done. Nobody's getting left behind."
"I'm done updating!"
"Let me see, let me see!"
The desktop user cheered as his update finished, and he entered the main menu.
Everyone else immediately crowded behind him, eager to see what exactly had been added in this update.
"Four brand-new modes! And every single one is a different gameplay type!"
"There's way more stuff to play now. What about battle royale? I heard the new season added a lot there too."
The desktop player switched to the battle royale tab, and a new season notification window popped up.
It detailed all the latest updates for the season.
The map had undergone major changes.
Every season brought adjustments—big and small—to the map.
Resource hotspots that players had already memorized were now completely different.Whether you were a new player or a veteran, everyone had to relearn the map from scratch.
"Another new map—awesome! Maybe this time we can take down some of the high-rank monsters!"
The group quickly agreed to form a four-player squad and jump into a few standard battle royale matches.
Streamers Everywhere
"Whoa, I've got Dorothea in my match. She's a super high-level player—a really active female streamer lately."
"Huh?! It's Dorothea? Your luck's insane. You're in the same lobby—try taking her out!"
"I'm trying."
The moment the new season unlocked, Morgan Group's servers were hit with terrifying traffic.
It felt less like a game launch and more like a massive data attack.
The Morgan cloud server team was completely caught off guard.
Just moments earlier, the department had been in a meeting, discussing how to allocate even more resources to Fortnite.
Then an employee burst in and interrupted the meeting, reporting that the Fortnite servers were nearing capacity.
The executives panicked, immediately ending the meeting and rushing to the server management console.
Server Panic
"One million… two million… three million…"
"Damn it, what's going on?! Why is there such insane traffic all of a sudden? Does anyone know?!"
One employee timidly raised his hand.
"Well… it might be because Fortnite released its new season update this morning, and a ton of players logged in at once."
"Just because of a new version update? This traffic is higher than the game's previous peak! How is that even possible?! Did they really make a massive expansion in just two or three months?"
"Uh… yeah. They added a lot this time."
The management team was stunned—but they snapped back to reality quickly.
They immediately ordered more server resources to be redirected to Fortnite.
Right now, Fortnite was Morgan Cloud's showcase project.
Nintendo needed Fortnite's explosive success to prove its value.
And Morgan Cloud needed it just as much.
They needed to show the world that their servers could handle any level of traffic, no matter how massive.
If something went wrong with such a key project, compensation claims would be the least of their worries—it could damage future partnerships.
So even internally reserved servers were brought online.
This was not the time to be stingy.
The Trap Takes Hold
Over at Nintendo, they had no idea what chaos was unfolding at Morgan Group.
Takayuki had just finished watching the team upload all update files and was waiting for players to flood in.
He had estimated that concurrent players would hit around two million, with three million being inevitable in the near future.
But seeing the number break three million so quickly genuinely surprised him.
In the original world, Fortnite had been massive—but it still took several months to exceed three million concurrent players.
Here, they'd hit the initial target in just three months.
Much faster than expected.
Clearly, the new content was both rich and plentiful, and players were eating it up.
And judging from discussion trends on Facebook and other social platforms, it was obvious that many players were being pulled in by their friends.
The pattern was almost always the same:
A friend recommends Fortnite.You don't really care at first.But since it's free, you can play together, and it even runs on your phone, you think—why not give it a try?
Then you're hooked.
It always starts with:
"This game looks so childish."
Then—
"Huh? I died? How did I die? That shouldn't have happened. I must've messed up. One more round."
"Dead again? No, no—that was still my mistake. I shouldn't have done that."
Over and over again.
Every loss feels like it could have been avoided.
And before you realize it, you've spent the entire day playing with your friends.
Then the next day, the game is all you can think about.
So you log in again.
And the cycle continues.