Epic Games has pulled a Travis Scott emote from the Fortnite Item Shop following the tragedy at the rapper’s Houston ‘Astroworld’ concert.
Eight people, ages 14 - 27, were killed at the concert in what has been described as a “death trap” in which the crowd was so thick that people were crushed to death and suffocated in the throng. A 9-year-old remains in a medically induced coma following the catastrophe. Countless others were injured.
“I’m honestly just devastated,” Scott said in a video statement. “We’re actually working right now to identify the families so we can help assist them through this tough time.”
Travis Scott performed a rather spectacular in-game Fortnite concert back in April of 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Epic Games sold Travis Scott skins and emotes in the Item Shop and the rapper walked away with his shortest and most successful concert ever.
Nearly 28 million people tuned in to watch the concert (which took place as a live-event in the popular battle royale game and was repeated several times).
According to Forbes, Scott earned around $20 million for his 9-minute-long Fortnite concert, “$5 million from the traditional endorsement part of the deal and another $15 million from merchandise sales, collecting on the deal for the merch rights that he worked out for himself.”
In other words, Scott’s Fortnite debut was a massive success.
Certainly a Fortnite concert is safer than the real thing. Roughly 50,000 people were in attendance at Astroworld in Houston. The venue was not equipped to handle such a large and wild crowd, though investigations into the tragedy continue. Witness accounts of the event are horrifying and sad.
I’ve reached out to Epic Games to see whether they plan to pull or disable all Travis Scott content from the game or whether the company will be offering refunds on those cosmetics. I will update this post when and if Epic releases a statement.
Disabling these items in the immediate wake of the tragedy also doesn’t have to mean permanently excluding them from the game, though I suspect the nature of the tragedy will prevent their return to the Item Shop at least any time soon.
This is a tough call, I realize, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Having celebrities and rappers like Travis Scott in games like Fortnite is new territory, to say the least. How to deal with real world tragedies or other controversies spilling over into the metaverse of a game like Fortnite or Roblox is a novel challenge, but one we’ll see more and more of in years to come.
Update:
Epic has responded with no comment, pointing me to the status update that Fortnite’s support Twitter posted when the company removed the Travis Scott emote from the Item Shop:
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