Fortnite Removes Travis Scott Emote Due to Astroworld Tragedy
After last week's tragedy, Epic Games and Sony are distancing themselves from Travis Scott. The artist's dance emote has been removed from Fortnite, and the PS5 ad video featuring the rapper has disappeared from the PlayStation channel.
Epic Games decided to remove the 'Out West' emote, featuring rapper Travis Scott dancing, from Fortnite. No reason was given for the decision, but it's definitely related to the tragedy that occurred last week at the Astroworld festival. As the artist took the stage, the crowd began rushing towards him, resulting in 8 people losing their lives, 25 ending up in hospital and over 300 suffering minor injuries. Accusations quickly surfaced that Scott encouraged dangerous behavior and stopped the show too late.
Epic Games has reacted violently by removing the entire daily emote section of the virtual store. Players believe the reason is that the latest set was to include one with Travis Scott dancing to celebrate the end of the Astroworld festival.
The rapper is one of the artists most associated with Fortnite. Last year, the game hosted his virtual concert, and the audience of this live event exceeded 12.3 million people. The recording of the performance on YouTube was viewed more than 172 million times. On this occasion, Epic Games also released two skins associated with the event, additional cosmetic objects and the now removed Out West emote. For now, it is not known whether the developers will also remove other elements associated with Travis Scott.
Not only the developers of Fortnite are trying to distance themselves from the artist. Last year, Sony hired Travis Scott to advertise PlayStation 5. The Japanese company has just removed the video created on this occasion from YouTube. A mirror, however, remained on the rapper's Twitter account. On his YT channel you can still find other materials from this collaboration.
