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Fortnite hits 125M users ahead of first World Cup in 2019

Qualifiers for the competition begin later this year.

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Andrew Lanxon
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Epic Games

Get your trigger finger ready. The first Fortnite World Cup will take place in 2019, Epic Games has confirmed.

The news came via a company blog post, in which Epic also boasted that the battle royale game had reached a whopping 125 million users. It's unclear if that refers to total registered users or active users and Epic didn't respond to a request for comment.

The World Cup will be open to all players worldwide and qualifiers will take place later this year ahead of the finals in "late 2019". 

"This is for you, the players," Epic said in its blog post. "Qualifications for the Fortnite World Cup will be based on merit. Epic will not be selling teams or franchises, and won't allow third-party leagues to do so either." 

The news follows Epic's announcement of its $100 million pool of cash for prizes -- presumably with a decent chunk set aside for the winner of the World Cup.

Epic announced at this year's E3 gaming convention that Fortnite is now available for the Nintendo Switch. Meanwhile other game makers like Electronic Arts and Activision have been rushing to compete with it.

Watch this: Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch: This is what it looks like