If you still view Fortnite as a colorful battle royale with a strong touch of cartoonish connotations, you might be astonished by the real scope of Epic's true plans.

The big, chaotic fight to the death matches may still get top billing, but Epic has steadily been expanding the horizons of its marquee game to be more of a game platform than a simple standalone game. Fortnite's psychedelic live events, the kaiju Ariana Grande concerts, and its endless user-generated sandbox worlds were all hints about its final destination.

X may never be an everything app, but Fortnite is already an everything game. And it just got a lot bigger.

Rapid fire over consecutive days last week, Epic launched three new games within the game, starting with the survival title Lego Fortnite on Thursday. That was followed quickly by Fortnite Festival, a rhythm game from the studio behind Rock Band, and Rocket Racing, a fast-paced racing game from the makers of Rocket League.

Epic and Lego's new co-project reached 2.45 million concurrent players within days of its release. While Fortnite's regular modes like Zero Build and classic Battle Royale accumulated decent numbers throughout the weekend, people also played around in the two other new games, but Lego Fortnite launched on a completely different level.

Lego Fortnite, a snug hybrid of well-loved games like Minecraft, Animal Crossing and Valheim, more on that later in our review, relentlessly floated around those same high peaks, and by Monday evening sat at around 1.1 million players – itself an epic tally that would put to shame many hits on the Steam charts. It's a live "Big Bang" event that launched the trio of new games nearly a week ago, bringing aboard 11.6 million concurrent players in attendance in the ballpark of Fortnite's live shows for artists such as Marshmello or Travis Scott.

Lego Fortnite is just one corner of Epic's multiverse, but it's clearly the hottest one at the moment. Fortnite's overall concurrent online players count is somewhere far above that (combining all Fortnite Creative modes, ranked play, Battle Royale, etc.), but most importantly, it's that a family-friendly game in a totally different genre is generating this much buzz. If Lego Fortnite can maintain its momentum with a steady drip of compelling content that deepens the game, its free-to-play, fun for the whole family multiplayer experience may have nowhere to go but up.