Maker of Fortnite sues YouTubers for selling cheats

NEW YORK (FOX5NY.COM) - You might have heard about Fortnite from, well, anyone who is 8 or older. You might have seen the dances from it; actually, you almost definitely have.

Fortnite is a super-addictive battle shooting game that more than a hundred million people are spending hours and a lot of cash on. People are even hiring coaches to get better at it.

Enter hackers like Brandon Lucas, who has 1.7 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He sells hacks or mods—modifications that essentially allow players to cheat.

Tom's Guide editor Sherri Smith is impressed by Lucas' hacking ability—to an extent.

"The ingenuity and talent cannot be denied but you wish they were using it for good," Smith says. "Gaming is about sportsmanship and having fun and playing with others. And these guys aren't playing well with others right now."

Dropping the hammer on this is Epic Games, which owns Fortnite. The company is suing Lucas and another YouTuber to protect the fairness and popularity of the game and says that cheaters are breaking the law.

Bad behavior is nothing new to the gaming industry, but Lucas's hack allows players to unfairly kill off other players. Epic Games thinks the community could walk.

As you might've guessed, this isn't just about sportsmanship but also about business. Even though this game was only released last year, it already has 125 million players. The estimated monthly revenue from Fortnite is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

On his YouTube page, Lucas says Epic Games is unfairly singling him out.

But Smith says the buck probably won't stop with him.

"If they're coming after you, don't think that those other folks are not going to get a cease-and-desist sooner than later," she says. "Epic is tired of it."

Epic wants to protect players and its economic self-interest.