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Fortnite down for maintenance just as Radical Heights launches

Two days ago, Gears of War's creator launched a free battle royale game. Now, as a new competitor emerges, Fortnite is down for emergency maintenance.

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Daniel Van Boom is an award-winning Senior Writer based in Sydney, Australia. Daniel Van Boom covers cryptocurrency, NFTs, culture and global issues. When not writing, Daniel Van Boom practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reads as much as he can, and speaks about himself in the third person.
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Daniel Van Boom
Epic Games

Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski this week surprised gamers by launching his studio's new battle royale game, Radical Heights, with an "Xtreme Early Access" release.

So naturally, it's a perfect time for Epic Games to have to shut down Fortnite servers for emergency maintenance on Thursday. At the time of writing, Fortnite has been down for eight hours. 

The battle royale genre, where you parachute onto sprawling, weapon-littered terrain, do battle with 99 other players until only one (hopefully you) remains, was popularised last year with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG. Since then, Epic Games has released a free battle royale mode for its Fortnite game, which now rivals PUBG in popularity. Radical Heights, by Boss Key Productions, is the newest challenger in the very-hot-right-now genre.

Fortnite is often played by hip hop superstar Drake, who last month sent the internet insane when he broadcast his video game foibles with popular Twitch streamer Ninja. Conversely, Twitter isn't dealing well with the outage: