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Drake and Ninja playing Fortnite smashes Twitch world record

That's a rap.

Wesley Yin-Poole avatar
News by Wesley Yin-Poole Former Editor-in-Chief
Updated on
40 comments

Overnight and this morning, Canadian rapper Drake played Fortnite with streamer Ninja and helped smash Twitch's concurrent viewers record.

Drake, playing on a PlayStation 4, joined forces with hugely popular Fortnite Twitch streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who was playing on a PC, and after some technical issues managed to play the Battle Royale portion of the Epic-developed game, with the pair chatting via Discord.

Viewers piled in, as you'd expect, but the stream went stratospheric after Drake told his 36.8m Twitter followers what he was up to. The stream pushed past the 600,000 concurrent viewers mark, hitting 635,000 at one point.

Popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds streamer Dr Disrespect held the previous record for concurrent viewers on Twitch with over 388,000, set in February 2018.

It turns out, Drake is a big Fortnite fan and is pretty good at the game! Drake and Ninja ended up with four duo wins before playing squads with US rapper Travis Scott and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster.

Their final game ended just after 8.30am UK time, with Ninja saying he had gained an eye-watering 10,000 Twitch subscriptions from the session alone. That's people paying a monthly fee (or their free subscription per month option) - not just followers.

"We literally made history tonight," Ninja said. "Thank you guys for watching!"

While the session is remarkable for Ninja, it also cements Fortnite's place as the hottest game on earth. The Battle Royale portion of the shooter, which is free to download, has gone from overnight hit to pop culture phenomenon in what feels like just a few months, with an army of celebrities declaring their love of the game, a huge following on Twitch and, according to Epic, a whopping 3.4m concurrent players as of February.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, or why your kids run up stairs to play Fortnite after they get home from school, check out Christian Donlan's piece on the game.

What next? Barack Obama playing Civilization?

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