Fuck Fortnite.
Fuck Fortnite for shamelessly exploiting the work of smaller, often marginalised creators and making obscene profits off it, while giving nothing back.
Fuck Fortnite for doing nothing but riding trends while contributing nothing of value of its own.
Fuck Fortnite for the gambling psychology that drives its entire monetization system, and the pretense that it’s anything other than that.
Fuck Fortnite for using battle passes, timed events, and the like to weaponise FOMO in order to breed compulsive, habitual play patterns.
You know what? Fuck beating around the bush. Fuck Fortnite for being designed to be addictive, as much as the ghouls at Epic want to claim otherwise.
Fuck Fortnite for patting itself on the back when it changed how its loot boxes work, and pretending it was some big damn hero standing up to The Man when it comes to unethical monetisation, even though that’s just one page of a whole damn playbook lifted wholesale from the gambling industry.
Fuck Fortnite for the way it centres decontextualised gun violence and abdicates all responsibility that comes with that.
Fuck Fortnite for its juxtaposition of realistic military-style weapons and budget-brand Pixar-esque cartoon aesthetic, in a way that makes said decontextualised violence specifically appealing to children despite the age ratings applied to the game.
Fuck Fortnite for deliberately courting underage players through toys and other “fun”, kid-friendly licensed merch.
Even if we take it in good faith that Epic isn’t deliberately trying to appeal to young children, fuck Fortnite and fuck Epic for doing nothing to try and address what’s clearly become a major problem, regardless of their intentions.
Fuck Fortnite for its brazen use of the term “Battle Royale”, even though it represents exactly the kind of mindless, thoughtless, entertaining violence that Battle Royale was so critical of.
Fuck Fortnite for failing to understand the “Battle Royale” concept even on the most superficial level imaginable, to the point of normalising “squads” in a game concept that, at its core, revolves around the idea that nobody can be trusted but teamwork is the surest way to survive.
Fuck Fortnite for leading the charge on the “games as a service” concept, and helping popularise the idea that games should be nothing more than vessels content to be mindlessly consumed and forgotten about as soon as the next piece of content comes along.
Fuck Fortnite for the exploitative, inhumane conditions used to keep the never-ending content mill churning.
Fuck Fortnite for trying to murder all artistic merit in videogames as a medium, in favour of being nothing more than toys, mass-produced for the sake of profit.
Fuck Fortnite, and fuck Epic for trying to pretend its some David going up against Apple’s Goliath, when Epic is every bit the soulless, artless, profit-before-anything-else corporate cesspit that Apple is.
Fuck Fortnite for being a poster child of every awful, unethical, anti-art, anti-consumer trend in the game industry (even if it instigated none of them, because there isn’t a single strand of innovation anywhere in its DNA).
Fuck Epic Games, fuck Tim Sweeney, and most of all,
Fuck Fortnite.
