Is Fortnite Becoming a Relationship Wrecker?

Fortnite is currently all over the news as it’s become one of the most popular games ever played. It has far surpassed the popularity of Overwatch, the big multiplayer game in 2016 and has almost doubled Minecraft in monthly users in less than a year beating Minecraft’s 74 million with its 125 million. It is an online third-person shooter game with a variety of different game modes with the most popular being the battle royale mode, a free-to-play battle royale game where up to 100 players fight in increasingly smaller spaces to be the last person standing. Its popularity coincides with the popularity of competitive gaming or eSports and the video streaming platform Twitch in the last five years which has made players and streamers celebrities. The most popular streamer on the platform is Richard Tyler Blevins, who goes by his online alias Ninja, with over eleven million followers and an average of over 43,000 viewers per stream.

Video-games has been blamed for many things in the three decades they have become a part of popular culture and entertainment. They’ve been blamed for isolation, alienation, anger issues, mental health issues, misogyny, violence, mass shootings etc. There has been no evidence that video-games have more of an effect on a person’s capability for violence or any of the aforementioned issues than any other medium can. Yet again there has been another study claiming that Fortnite has become addictive. According to research by online divorce website, http://www.divorce-online.co.uk/, it is affecting marriages and relationships. The company has received data that there have been ‘200 divorce petitions since January 1st where addiction to Fortnite and other online gaming has been cited as one of the reasons for divorce.’