Surprise! 'Fortnite' is blowing every game out of the water on Twitch

In the first half of 2018, there was one game on Twitch that performed heads above the rest: Fortnite.

Fortnite has taken Twitch by storm this year, beating out League of Legends in the second quarter of 2018 to become the most-viewed game on the livestreaming platform, according to a data report from streaming company StreamElements.

In the first half of the year, Twitch viewers watched 630 million hours of Fortnite. That's about 71,900 years worth.

Coming in at second place is the titan of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, League of Legends, which clocked in under 500 million hours of viewership. Surprisingly, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) garnered less than half the viewership of Fortnite so far in 2018, coming in at under 300 million views.

While PUBG was a breakout hit in 2017 as it ignited the craze that has become battle royale-style games, Fortnite seems to have swept up most battle royale fans. Between the first and second quarters of 2018, while Fortnite grew 74% in hours viewed while PUBG dropped 9%.

So how did we get here? Well, For one thing, Fortnite, while not the first battle royale game to make a splash, is a bit more accessible than other battle royale games. The matches are a bit shorter than PUBG's, the visuals are brighter, the weapons and mechanics are more dynamic.

Plus, Drake didn't play PUBG with the streamer Ninja, he played Fortnite, bringing in hundreds of viewers who probably would never have considered watching the game on Twitch in the first place.

That single instance helped spur a surge in Fortnite on Twitch, nearly doubling both the number of people who stream Fortnite and the number of people that amount of time that people spent watching it.

As long as Fortnite continues on its current path and maintains its viewer numbers, it's possible that it could beat League of Legends to become 2018's most-watched game, a tough feat to accomplish.