'Fortnite shutdown' rumors are taking the community by storm

Modified Aug 19, 2020 11:43 GMT

Fortnite is estimated to have a net worth of around $2 billion. In 2018, the game garnered a total of approximately $2.4 billion in revenue. This was followed by a weaker year, as the figure came down to around $1.8 billion in 2019. Regardless, Fortnite continues to be one of the biggest online multiplayer games and had about 350 million registered users as of May 2020.

Fortnite has seen some controversies as well. Older player will remember when, back in 2018, Korean company Bluehole announced plans to file a lawsuit against Epic Games. This was concerning the 'copyright infringements' of their battle royale game, PUBG.

It was somewhere here that the 'Fortnite shutdown' rumors first hit the internet. This was because some fake Fortnite Twitter accounts had announced the same, citing the lawsuit. You can see one such tweet below.

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Addressing the ‘Fortnite shutting down tweet’

As already mentioned, all tweets claiming that the game is shutting down are fake, and no such confirmation or suggestion has been forthcoming from an official channel. Regardless, Fortnite fans across the world seem concerned, and the phrase has been highly-searched over the past few days.

It must be said that the same kind of situation has been observed in the past. During the October 2019 'The End' event, users had been just as concerned. The game had been down for two days, and all players could see was a black screen with a tiny black hole in the center.

However, the event ended on 15th October with a big bang, which resulted in the creation of the Fortnite Chapter 2 universe.

Now, users are concerned for a very different reason. We recently spoke about Fortnite being pulled from the Google and Apple app stores. The step was taken because the game's developers had decided to give users an alternative payment system. Players could directly pay Epic and save around 20% of their money, a move which was not well-received by the two tech giants.

Regardless, while the game might not be available for Apple users, for the time being, Android users can still employ the Epic Games Launcher to download and install Fortnite.

Furthermore, despite the existence of these rumors, no such suggestion has been made from official channels. Hence, Fortnite will not shut down anytime soon, and it is only because of the feud that the game is not available on the Apple and Google app stores.

Edited by Ravi Iyer