Fortnite Blamed for 200+ Divorces in the UK Alone

Through the surprisingly short history of video games, people have blamed these media for a lot of things: causing violence, of course, but they’ve also been blamed for anti-social behavior, childhood obesity, robbing and stealing from children (which is actually true now, bless), promoting devil worship, premarital sex, and generally contributing to the downward spiral of society. Which, to be fair, isn’t exactly untrue, in so far that sometimes when you play games online it really feels like society is dead and we’re just playing out the motions.

But I digress. A lot of things have been blamed on video games, and now you can add “failing marriages” to that list, because according to divorce-online.co.uk (and reported by the Daily Dot, and re-reported by Kotaku), Fortnite is directly responsible for over 200 divorces this year in the UK alone, and that number is just going up.

”Addiction to drugs, alcohol and gambling have often been cited as reasons for relationship breakdowns but the dawn of the digital revolution has introduced new addictions. These now include online pornography, online gaming and social media, so it is no surprise to us that more and more people are having relationship problems because of our digital addictions. These numbers equate to roughly 5% of the 4,665 petitions we have handled since the beginning of the year and as one of the largest filers of divorce petitions in the UK, is a pretty good indicator.”

Now, you’re going to want to take all of this with a few grains (or a couple of scoops) of salt, as I’m not sure divorce-online.co.uk is exactly the world’s most trustworthy source, especially as they say they got this number from “data mining”, but if it is true, or even kind of true, it would be a glaring fact. Not only because of the divorces, but it would also indicate that people who play Fortnite are able to get married.

I’ll need to double-check on that, because that doesn’t sound right to me.