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Fortnite star, Clix, recently received a personal warning from Epic Games that they would ban his account if he continued to host wagers with his viewers.
Cody ‘Clix’ Conrod was a part of the second generation of Fortnite pros who came up on Twitch after figures like Ninja and Tfue left the game. Out of the “newer” crop of Fortnite streamers, Clix is among the most popular – if not the most popular – streamers in the game.
The meta of Fortnite streaming changed after the old guard left. Instead of watching lighthearted pub-stomping content, viewers began to watch true pro Fortnite players who would scrimmage, box fight, and compete on-stream nearly every day.
One of the methods of competition was wager matches. Players would join a custom Zone Wars or box fight map and bet money that they’d win. Pros would often play one another with this format, but would also open the door to viewers – allowing them to compete against their favorite streamer.
This practice was relatively common in Fortnite, but Epic Games never supported it – for obvious reasons. There was always talk of a crack-down on Fortnite wagers, but nothing ever happened.
That was until recently when Clix was hosting wagers with his viewers on-stream. According to him, someone from Epic Games reached out to NRG – Clix’s organization – to tell them that if Clix continued to host wagers, he’d be banned.
Clix immediately stopped his wagers and told any viewers who signed up that he’d refund them. Clearly frustrated and dejected, Clix complained that Epic seemed to decide to crack down on him and let other streamers slide.
“I’m not even mad that they’re telling me to stop wagering. I get it,” he said. “The thing is, why me and nobody else? The whole com[munity] does wagers and I get warned.”
This warning comes on the heels of Epic banning high-level paid scrimmages at the beginning of the year. Epic cracked down on some of the biggest scrims in all regions for their format – a pay-to-enter system that Epic didn’t want to see continue.
Now, with the banning of wager matches, a lot of the top pro players feel as though there’s little for them to do in Fortnite. Clix echoed this sentiment in a follow-up tweet, saying that he “won’t be able to play Arena with the amount of f***ing stream snipers.”
The banning of wagers and scrims and the addition of some disliked weapons like the Primal Shotgun prompted Fortnite players to rage on Twitter, with the hashtag #ripfortnite hitting the trending tab – not for the first time.
It’s understandable that Epic don’t want largely underage players gambling money on their game. The combination of wager bans and scrim bans has fueled the frustration of pro players in a game that offers little in the way of official competition formats during the off-season.
With one of the biggest streamers in Fortnite getting a warning, we wouldn’t be surprised to see wagers die-off in the Fortnite community. Hopefully, Epic can replace these unofficial competition settings with some of their own.
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