Fortnite: Is This Really The End?

The Fortnite community has been patiently waiting over the past week during the countdown to the next season of the madly popular Battle Royale game. Today, the live rocket launch event occurred as scheduled, but the result was The End of Fortnite as we all know it.

Today, we all tuned in to Fortnite Battle Royale at exactly 2 PM EDT for the live rocket launch leading us into the next season. Widely speculated was the end of the current map, and the beginning of Fortnite: Chapter Two. We did not expect the actual end of Fortnite.

Thanks to a leak by the Italian IOS App Store earlier this week, the cover art photo for Fortnite was leaked along with the new title of the game, Fortnite: Chapter Two. The cover art showed a brand new map and a brand new mode of transportation…boats. The Fortnite community rallied around the leaks and spread joy across social media outlets. A new map meant a breath of fresh air for the somewhat stale game.

As planned, the rocket at Dusty Depot launched today as expected. Once the rocket had launched, players were sucked into the Zero Point at Loot Lake, and I watched the island below me explode. Once the island had exploded, the black hole appeared. The event was quite spectacular in its own right.

Unfortunately, the black hole has been shown on the Fortnite screen for over two and a half hours now, and nothing else is visible. As shown in the picture above taken from an in-game screenshot, there is nothing left of Fortnite besides this blackhole.

At the same time that the black hole appeared, all of Fortnite’s social media accounts went dark as well. The twitter account for @FortniteGame shows the black hole as the game’s profile picture and all other tweets have been deleted. Yep, all other tweets are gone, forever. The same is true over at Instagram. There is a new black hole profile picture and posts of the black hole.

Is this one of the most brilliant marketing moves ever made by a gaming company, or will this be a major blow to the Fortnite community. No one seems to know what is going on. We don’t know when the game will be live again, or if it will be live ever again. I certainly can’t imagine the end of Fortnite, but they teased us all week long with The End. Should we have taken their message seriously?

Let us know your thought in the comment section below. Is this really the end or just another marketing ploy to get us talking about the new season?