Fnatic Sweeps European League Of Legends Spring Finals

The 2018 League Championship series spring split comes to a close today. In Europe, the grand finals hosted Fnatic and G2. It was the former who put on a convincing display, cruising to a 3-0 win and putting on one of the better showings of any League of Legends finals in recent memory.

G2's young-gun roster was formed around Luka “Perkz” Perković, a stellar mid lane player who’s led G2 to multiple split titles. Despite a rough start, G2 rallied to make the spring finals, but would face a Fnatic roster that had dominated the regular European season. Chief among the Fnatics was Martin “Rekkles” Larsson, a marksman player who has been with the team for years and was looking to put it back in its rightful place atop the European standings.

Make no mistake, these games were close in the early minutes. Each side was able to trade back and forth, but it was the team that turned those early advantages into mid-and-late game leads who came out on top. In this case, that team was Fnatic.

Larsson led the action for Fnatic, chalking up not one but two pentakills in the first two games. His Sivir in game 2 was potent, but it was Tristana that he shone on. The short, cannon-wielding gunner is something of a specialty of Larsson’s, and he made sure G2 respected it in games 1 and 3. Here’s penta number one:

And penta number two:

G2's biggest hope was that Gabriël “Bwipo” Ru, who was subbing in the top lane for Paul “sOAZ” Boyer due to a hand injury, would be a weak point to exploit. But Ru more than held his own, playing his role effectively in fights with big Sion axe-slams controlling the chaos.

It was really a team effort across the board. Each player on Fnatic just seemed to outclass G2, especially once the game shifted from the lane-oriented early stages to broader strategy (sometimes referred to as “macro”) as each game went on. Fnatic looked organized, coached, collected, and confident. Larsson didn’t die a single time the entire series. Three games, no deaths. That alone is an incredible achievement.

So how did Fnatic cap it off? In game 3, they had G2's nexus wide open for the win, but a single member of G2 was waiting around in safety of their fountain for the game to end. Fnatic was not having that, and used Ryze’s mass teleport to dive headfirst into the enemy fountain and its destructive laser security in order to get the last kill.

With the win, Fnatic secures a spring split title and a ticket to the midseason invitational. More than that, it sends a message to power regions like Korea and even North America: Be ready. This Fnatic line-up is looking like a serious international contender.

Fortnite Mobile pulled in over $15 million in 20 days

Epic Games' mobile port of Fortnite has generated more than $15 million gross revenue on iOS in less than a month.

App intelligence firm Sensor Tower claims Epic Games took home $10.5 million of the $15 million grossed globally in the free-to-play title’s first 20 days since it began monetising on March 15th.

Fortnite Mobile enjoyed a surge in revenue after Epic made it available to everyone for download, following a brief invite-only period.

Peak player spend grew by 197 per cent to $1.8 million on the first day of full release. The day before the game made a still impressive $620,000.

Revenues were also helped along with the introduction of a new and limited-time starter pack which offered players discounted in-game currency and a free character skin.

King of the charts

Fornite Mobile has unsurprisingly also been going strong in downloads since the game was opened up to all players. It is said to have surpassed 11 million global installs since launch and it still occupies a place in the top 10 grossing chart on iPhone in 23 countries.

The US is proving particularly lucrative with $6.4 million brought in during the last seven days and has managed to edge out other popular titles like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans, which snagged $5.8 million and $4.1 million respectively in the same time frame.

Fortnite has proven hugely popular on both PC and mobile. Its success has also spawned a wave of new online stars such as Twitch favourite Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who in one stream played with recording giant Drake.

That stream attracted over 600k concurrent viewers and peaked at around 630k. It was helped in no small part by Drake tweeting out a link to his 36.9 million followers.