Furious families refunded over £40-a-head Fortnite festival ‘fiasco’
HUNDREDS of parents demanded refunds for a festival celebrating the computer game Fortnite after they spent hours queuing for ‘rip-off’ attractions.
The two-day celebration was billed as ‘the Fortnite event of the year’ with ‘awesome activities’ for children who love the popular online survival game.
But many families were left enraged by what was on offer, with some spending as little as 20 minutes on the site in Norwich.
All tickets for the Fortnite Live event, which is not thought to be officially affiliated with the game or its producer Epic Games, were sold in advance at prices of up to £22.
But fans paid an extra £20 on the day for wristbands to try out activities such as a ‘cave experience’ – which turned out to be a tunnel through a trailer with a slide.
Despite there being about 2,800 festival goers on Saturday, there was only room for two people at a time to try out BB guns and just one climbing wall tower for three climbers at a time, it was claimed. Several attractions including the 72 computer consoles available for fans to play Fortnite also had hour-long queues, visitors said.
Organisers agreed to refund the cost of the wristbands after being flooded with complaints that the event was a ‘fiasco’.
One disgruntled mother said: ‘The whole event was a shambles... Fortnite is all about hunting people down and killing them. I felt like doing that to the people who organised it,’ while Sharmagne Spencer wrote on Facebook: ‘Avoid! Avoid! Really not worth it, my boys were miserable.’
On the second day yesterday, only 1,000 of the 2,500 people who bought advance tickets are thought to have turned up. But despite the shorter queues many families were still unhappy with the activities.
Claire Parker, 39, of Spixworth, Norfolk, who went with husband Charles, 39, and daughters Mia, ten, and Eva, six, said: ‘I feel like I have been robbed. We paid more than £55 for four tickets and we only stayed for 30 minutes. We bought tickets as a birthday present for Mia... It was very amateurish. I have never been anywhere so rubbish.’
Shaun Lord, owner of Exciting Events which organised the event and is planning two more, said he had given a refund to everyone who had asked.