The War For Weekly Fortnite Tournaments Escalates Between Epic And Keemstar

If you're an avid fan of Fortnite, it seems like you've heard of Friday Fortnite, the popular weekly stream that features a mixture of well-known competitive players, YouTubers, streamers, and celebrities playing the game. The stream boasts over half a million viewers on average thanks to aggressive and skilled marketing by YouTuber Keemstar and UMG, collaborators on the weekly event. For the first time, however, Keemstar has chosen to cancel Fortnite Friday due to competition from Epic.

Last week, Epic began their own weekly Fortnite show under the title Summer Skirmish. The inaugural episode didn't go well. Due to the notably high prize pool, the participants had more to lose and ended up playing incredibly conservatively, making for a boring match to watch. The lag on the important match didn't help, either. Epic vowed to do better and made a last-minute schedule for the second episode for today, July 20.

This conflicts with Fortnite Friday, which alone is a pretty big problem. According to Keemstar, Epic invited all the Fortnite Friday players to ditch their regularly scheduled programming and join Summer Skirmish, which is an even bigger problem. Beyond that, Epic also capped the prize pool for Fortnite Friday at $20,000, while Epic's own event can go to $500,000. Keemstar says he's not holding anyone back from having to choose between the two prize pools, so he's cancelling Fortnite Friday this week.

In a response on Twitter, Keemstar was a lot more blunt.

Friday Fortnite aka Epic games told me Daniel Keem aka Keemstar I cant have events over $20k prize pools .

Can you people fucking read?

I would have $1M events by now

— KEEM 🍿 (@KEEMSTAR) July 20, 2018

In a video released on Wednesday, Keemstar explained that his new plan is to reschedule Fortnight Fridays to Sunday, which would presumably provoke a name change and giving up some of the branding. It is unclear if that fixes the issue with the gulf between Fortnite Friday's prize pool and what Epic allows their own tournaments.

While the two events are similar in that they're people playing Fortnite, the actual structure is fairly different. In Keemstar's stream, players simply win or lose in a Team Deathmatch format. Epic changed this up with Summer Skirmish, giving players one point per player kill, five points for winning the match, and a bonus of ten points for achieving 20 kills in during a match. That last one also earns players $10,000 if they can pull it off.

This point system allows Epic to let people play freely and simply count up the point totals at the end of the tournament. Friday Fortnite is a much more rigid bracket structure, outlining a key difference between the two and how players participate in them.

We reached out to Epic for comment, but did not receive anything back at the time of writing.

 

Fortnite is making a lot of people a lot of money, so this was bound to happen. Hopefully Epic and Keemstar/UMG can work something out, because this becoming any more acrimonious will likely end up being a problem for everyone involved.