Fortnite is a phenomenon in the video game world—and its player base can be rabid at times.
Unfortunately, that enthusiasm sometimes spills over, especially when players have a grievance with the game, as one Ohio hobby shop owner has found out over the last few months. Epic Loot Games, a small business in Springfield, has been inundated with angry calls from players who think they’re reaching Epic Games, the game’s North Carolina-based developer.
The confusion is due to a number of factors. Epic, for example, only handles customer complaints via email and responses aren’t quick enough for some Fortnite players’ tastes. Finding the company’s phone number isn’t a painless process. And since players collect ‘loot’ in the game (supply boxes that contain weapons and other useful items), it’s not hard to confuse the developer’s name when searching “Fortnite loot” on Google.
Epic Loot Games is the first search result for epic loot and it has a phone number. That’s all some players need to vent.
“There are so many calls—pranks, angry gamers, kids who don’t understand why the support doesn’t have a readily available method of contact,” store owner Hunter Davies told gaming news site Kotaku. “We started telling them to use the website because they can’t actually talk to anyone on the phone.”
The calls are often angry, according to the report. Davies said the first time a player confused his store with the game developer “a kid between nine and 16 screamed expletives at me. … Then he just hung up on me.” To date, more than 130 calls from players were reported to have come in from confused players.
Fortnite, a multiplayer action shooter, pits players against each other in groups of up to 100 in fast-paced short games that keep things moving by regularly shrinking the size of the playing field. It’s similar in scope to Player Unknown’s Battleground, but has surpassed that game in popularity. In March, the game saw 3.4 million Fortnite fans playing at the same time.
The game has become so popular that it’s becoming a problem for Major League Baseball, as one Boston Red Sox pitcher had to miss a scheduled start after contracting a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome, which could be tied to his regular playing of the game.