Top Fortnite streamers like Ninja, Tfue, and Nickmercs failed to qualify in this weekend’s Open Qualifiers for regional berths in Fortnite’s World Cup Duos Finals.
Dot Esports has the full rundown on how the world’s most popular streamers fared this weekend, and it wasn’t pretty. Tfue and Dennis ‘Cloak’ Lepore fared the best out of the big-name streamers, finishing 84th in the North America East region with 57 total points. That put them 30 points shy of third place, which was the cutoff for qualifiers in the round. Nickmercs and NioRooch managed 18th place with 72 points, still short of what they would have needed to advance in North America West.
Ninja and his duos partner Reverse2k scored 53 points, putting them at 130th place North America East.
All in all, not a particularly auspicious weekend for Team Stream in the race for Fortnite’s World Cup championship, which be held July 26-28 at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York. Qualifying teams will be competing for a prize pool of $30 million (about £23 million).
Fortunately for them, they’ve still got four more opportunities to compete for slots in the tournament between now and then.
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There’s no doubt that Ninja and Tfue are excellent Fortnite players, but the results this weekend speak to the fact that building and entertaining a massive audience is a different set of skills than playing games at the pro level is. For streamers, it matters more that they’re interesting to watch and engaging than it does that they’re the best of the best.
You can check out Dot Esports’ list of all the qualifying players and teams here.
Again, there’s no sense in counting Ninja and Tfue out of the Fortnite World Cup just yet. There’s still a couple months until the big event, and anything can happen between now and then.