Epic Games Confirms a Fortnite SEA Server, But Conditions Attached

South East Asia is getting a Fornite server, in Singapore, but there’s a catch.

On 24th of August, Fornite maker Epic Games published it’s ‘State of Development’ for August. The post mentions what has been done and what the makers strive to achieve for the betterment of the game and the user experience.
One of the prime announcements from the post is the addition of a South East Asia server to lower ping for players from Asia. Note that players from countries like India play with a ping of up to 300 ms and the same goes for players from Southern-Eastern region of Asia, the Middle East and Russia.
Although Fortnite has an AWS server in Asia, it’s located in Tokyo, Japan – which substantially increases the latency for players playing from western parts of Asia.
On it’s ‘State of Development – August 2018’ article, Epic Games mentions –

…there are cases like our Asia region where players in Southeast Asia are not getting the kind of performance we’d like. Our solution is to add an additional datacenter in Singapore and use sub-region matchmaking to route you there if it would improve your ping, as long as wait times remain reasonable. When wait times grow too long, we’ll dynamically re-route you to a larger sub-region, in this case that’d be Tokyo. We think this is the best way to improve ping for the most people, without making ping worse for anyone.

So yes, Fortnite is getting a server based in Singapore. But the condition is that their needs to a high number of users playing at the same time. So the matchmaking times remain reasonable. If it’s taking too long for matchmaking to happen on the Singapore server, a player would automatically be rerouted to their Tokyo-based server – that has higher latency.

While Epic Games does officially confirm the addition of a new server, no dates have been announced yet. Also, even after the addition of this new server, Fortnite players from India are still going to have a ping ranging between 80-150 ms. While there’ll be little to no difference for players from the Middle East.

However, the post mentions that Epic Games will be adding servers for Russia, the Middle East and Northern Africa in the future. But there’s still no word on a Mumbai-based server.

Our goal is to provide the best possible quality of service everywhere in the world. We’ll continue to evaluate other areas where we can add additional data centers or new regions to improve performance for players. Some of the areas we’re investigating beyond Southeast Asia are the Middle East / Northern Africa and Russia. We’ll have more to share about our plans over the coming months.