We mentioned last week that Fortnite streamer Ninja has gotten so big that rapper Drake was following him on Instagram. Tonight, they hooked up for a game and it crushed the record for most concurrent viewers on a single stream for the service.
After some initial communications issues, and some adorable fan freakout from Ninja’s wife, viewers were able to tune in to see Ninja playing while Drake was on voice comms via Discord (the pair were separated by platforms, with Ninja on PC and Drake on PS4).
As the games wore on, the viewer count exploded, growing from around 200,000 when they first got voice chat working to just under 400,000 thirty minutes later, at which point Drake tweeted a link to his 36.7 million followers, and it really blew up.
There wasn’t just shooting; at one point Ninja asked how long Drake had been playing, who replied that it’s only been a month or two (he’s pretty good), and that he can often spend so long in the studio (15-20 hours at a time) that there’s plenty of time for downtime with stuff like games.
At time of posting the viewer count was at 501,000 (UPDATE 1:38am: it’s now at 607,000).
It was only last month that we were talking about a new record of 388,000. Welp.
[UPDATE 1 - 1:59am]: Just to make things a little weirder, exiled internet guru and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has jumped on the stream as well.
[UPDATE 2 - 6:04am]: OK this got wild. Rapper Travis Scott also joined in, as did Steelers WR JuJu Smith-Schuster.
You can see footage of the session below.
[UPDATE 3 - 6:13am]: Clarified in first paragraph that this is the record for most concurrent viewers for a single stream. Figures for the broadcast of major esports events have obviously been much higher.