Currently, there is news circulating about Fortnite: Fortnite is said to be the reason for divorces. That may be true, but primarily it is one thing: Damn good PR for a British divorce site, says our author Schuhmann.
What happened? On September 7th, a blog post appeared on the company site of “Divorce-online.co-uk.” This is a site that earns its money handling “divorces.” They proudly refer to themselves as: “The online divorce service that the British trust the most.”
So the company is happy about customers and free PR. They also maintain a company blog.
Who wrote the original article? The blog post was written by a “marketing expert” who also manages the company blog of the site.
What does the article say? The post is titled : Is Fortnite becoming a relationship wrecker? (via divorce-online)
In the blog post, it states: The company searched its data and in 200 cases, “Fortnite” was mentioned as the reason for the divorce.
Furthermore, it mentions that in digital times, new reasons for divorce are arising such as online porn, online gaming, and social media. Problems are caused by “digital addictions” .
Is Fortnite really the reason for divorce? No further details are provided on how exactly Fortnite plays into the divorces. It only states: Fortnite is mentioned as “part” of the reasons why someone files for divorce.
So it could be that there are 50 reasons in such a report and reason number 48 is then “He plays too much Fortnite.” The data is not accessible and unverifiable.
News spreads, becoming more dramatic
What happened to the news?
- Initially relatively little, the news appeared on September 7th on the company blog
- On September 11th, the news was picked up by some US gaming sites that specifically report on Fortnite – the tenor here was neutral “Fortnite contributes to divorces”
- On September 12th, smaller US mainstream sites reported on Fortnite as a relationship killer. Here it gets more dramatic: “Fortnite is accused of causing dozens of divorces”
- On September 15th, the news then reached big US sites like AV-Club and from there to the gaming site Kotaku – here again fairly neutral
- On September 17th, the news then hit with force in Germany. Here, sites like Heise, FAZ, or Focus report on “Fortnite as a relationship killer” – here there is no longer talk of “contributes to”, but straight to “reason for divorce” (FAZ), “relationship killer” (Express), “love killer” (Focus)
Tabloid writes: Fortnite destroys 4500 marriages a year
The harshest news about it: The UK tabloid “The Sun” also reported on the news on September 17th. They took from the story “Fortnite destroys 4500 marriages a year.” They simply extrapolated and generalized the numbers.
A US site, on the other hand, takes this news from The Sun and rounds it up to 5000.
This is what lies behind it: It is possible that Fortnite contributes to divorces. But this example shows how PR works.
The news and its worldwide distribution are a successful PR coup by the UK divorce site. It shows how one can create huge waves with minimal effort to make their brand more known by attaching to a current trend. If you wanted to book as much advertising, it would probably cost a fortune.
In the past, it was killer games, today relationship killers
It is interesting how the news becomes more dramatic – it follows the pattern of “Chinese whispers”. The spreading of the news is similar to the “Someone shat in front of the Fortnite stand at Gamescom” story.
The news matches what many believe about Fortnite and is therefore gladly spread.
While reports about action games used to portray games like Fortnite as “killer games”, they are now depicted as an “marriage killer”.
Fortnite has become so big that even such news can create huge waves. Especially in the UK, Fortnite is often used to stir public sentiment against gaming and its terrible influences:
