Fortnite for mobile is already the top iOS game and it’s not even really out yet

Just in case, for some reason, you thought Fortnite wasn’t going to be a license to print money once it made its official worldwide release on mobile …

Already super popular, Fortnite is having A Moment™ right now. First came Wednesday night’s awesome/surreal/record-breaking Twitch stream, with Ninja, Drake and others getting the world buzzing even on an otherwise mundane weeknight.

Now comes word that Fortnite is already the top iPhone game in the U.S., which a check of the App Annie top charts confirms to be true. Here’s the really interesting part: The game hasn’t even officially released for iPhone and iPad just yet.

Instead, Epic Games and Apple are rolling the battle royale game out as an “invite only event.” That means you need a code to start playing and can’t just roll up and download Fortnite from the App Store at the moment.

How many codes were given out? No one is saying for sure, but to rocket to the top of the charts like that, it had to be a significant amount. It’s an interesting tactic that is somewhere between devs just giving out codes for a small group of people to test and a full-fledged soft launch somewhere like Canada, but for a battle royale game, a pretty sizable group of beta testers is necessary to help smooth out all the kinks.

It should be really interesting to see how long Epic keeps the game in this state before just opening the doors and letting everyone in. With the massive install base of mobile gamers (a.k.a. everyone with an iPhone), this is actually a bigger step forward for Fortnite than you might think, especially since it offers cross-platform play. Once it officially releases, there likely won’t be any stopping it.

Next: What we learned watching the Epic Fortnite stream

There’s a good chance that even with its main competitor, PUBG, rushing its own mobile version into the west, Fortnite is about to lay siege to the top of the iOS top downloads chart for quite a while. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.