Fortnite has become a social phenomenon. Parents increasingly hire trainers for their children and play with them

Paul Rakovich with his children Mason (7 years old) and Carson (9 years old) play Fortnite together. All three take paid online lessons. Photo: Lindsey Rakovich Fortnite

's Kids Shooter continues to beat game industry records . The Android version will be released from day to day , but already now millions of young gamers and their parents in teams are fighting for hours in the arena.

The game has become so popular and so important for children that caring parents even hire special tutors at a rate of $ 10–20 per hour to help children learn the basics of shooter and team tactics, writes The Wall Street Journal .

Some parents worry that their children spend too much time playing. And others care that the child does not do everything in the game and he rarely comes out the winner. In such cases, and need a coach.

Coach found online. Four hours of online classes can be purchased for $ 50. On contractor sites like Gamer Sensei or Bidvine there are more than a thousand Fortnite trainers. These tutors themselves are not much older than their wards: “For me, this is truly surreal,” said 18-year-old Logan Werner, a Fortnite trainer from Utah and a member of the professional Gankstars team. “My dad never paid me for video game lessons.”

WSJ writes that for many modern children, Fortnite has become not just a game, but a social platform. Here, players show what they can do. Of the hundreds of players on the battlefield, only one team or one winning person remains.

In modern society, winning at Fortnite becomes as much a cause for pride as it used to be in school sports. Teens evaluate each other by the quality of the game - and even the authority in the school is built on the basis of the player's preferences, says Englishwoman Ally Hicks, who hired a Fortnite coach for her 10-year-old son. According to her, "there is a certain pressure on the players not only to play, but to be a really good player."

Some parents buy Fortnite lessons for their children, and then sit down on the game themselves. But often dads play worse than sons.


Ian Robertson (Euan Robertson), an insurance specialist from Arzieu-Le Muy (Switzerland), plays Fortnite with two sons, Andrew and Alexander.

In earlier times, only adults or older teenagers used some kind of skill trainers to help them. sought to become professionals in eSports. Now this phenomenon is of a completely different level. Increasingly, “tutors” are looking for parents for children of primary and secondary school age.

However, even now some parents have a hope that the son’s extraordinary playful abilities will pay off in the future. For example, in future commercial tournaments. Epic Games recently promised to organize tournaments with a total prize fund of $ 100 million. In addition, some colleges and universities in Western countries give special scholarships to applicants with abilities in a given computer game. Cybersport is now equated to a regular sport, so these preferential terms work for gamers just as they do for athletes.



Fortnite already recognizedthe most profitable free game for a single month. In May 2018, the game earned a crazy 318.3 million dollars. This is an absolute record in the history of computer games. Therefore, it is not surprising that Epic Games is ready to spend $ 100 million to pay out prizes in tournaments. This is her profit in just one or two weeks, and such tournaments will be an excellent marketing campaign and can greatly increase the popularity of the game.

Now the global audience of Fortnite exceeds 125 million people. According toWSJ columnist, Fortnite “meets young people's need for innocent mayhem” - and that’s the secret of its success. In other words, here violence is presented not in a rigid bloody form, but in a soft form, practically in an animated "cartoon" interface. Thus, even children can enjoy the game without traumatizing the psyche.