HyperX Ships 5 Million Gaming Headsets, Partly Credits Esports and ‘Fortnite’

By Stefanie Fogel

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – HyperX is celebrating a new milestone. The company shipped five million gaming headsets worldwide, it announced Monday. It’s crediting that success partly to the growing popularity of esports and the battle royale phenomenon “.”

“With the explosive growth of ‘Fortnite,’ ‘NBA 2K,’ and , HyperX is seeing an exciting expansion in the global gaming headset market,” said HyperX senior business manager Marcus Hermann in a press release. “HyperX has been supplying hardcore gamers with gear for over 10 years and we are now seeing our HyperX headsets becoming more popular with casual gamers. Shipping 5 million headsets is a major milestone as we continue to grow.”

HyperX is the official gaming headset partner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and Philadelphia 76ers, as well as the “NBA 2K” League and its esports teams the Mavs Gaming, Pacers Gaming, Grizz Gaming, Bucks Gaming, and Jazz Gaming. Boston Celtics player Gordon Hayward is a brand ambassador. Over 800,000 recently tuned into the HyperX Twitch channel to watch him play “Fortnite” with his daughter. 76ers player Joel Embiid and Sacramento Kings player De’Aaron Fox are also ambassadors. HyperX headsets are now available in 15,000 stores in over 100 countries.

Gaming headset and sound card manufacturer Turtle Beach also experienced a sales boost thanks, in part, to battle royale titles like “Fortnite” and “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.” It reportedly saw a 185% increase in net revenue over the same period last year, according to its first-quarter earnings report.

“The business is doing really, really well and what’s driving that — beyond our strategy and being a good quality product — is the ‘Fortnite,’ ‘PUBG,’ and battle royale craze, which has introduced a bunch of new people into games,” Turtle Beach CEO Juergen Stark recently told Variety.

“We’ve got sell-through data in models that go back years, and it is very clear that starting at the beginning of January that these two games had taken off on Xbox and PlayStation,” Stark added. “And it’s very clear it’s these two games that are driving a unique new phenomenon that is driving in new players and increasing headset use.”