Epic Games, Sony, Microsoft, and a bunch of game controller companies, are about to hit the fan, as the fans go online about false advertising for Fortnite Festival.
Update:
We have a direct statement regarding this article which we’ll leave below.
Instrument compatibility – let’s talk about it! Some updates:
Fortnite Festival X
We will be adding custom keybinding and support for additional guitar controllers on PC in the future.
Additionally, we’re going to kick off conversations with console makers to see what we can do to expand instrument compatibility anywhere it seems feasible.
We’ll share more as soon as we have it
Original Story…
A quick roundup for those who don’t know the full story: Fortnite Festival is a new musical game, that’s part of Fortnite. Epic Games promised that they would make video game guitar controllers compatible with the new game, including some old Rock Band guitar controllers.
Yesterday, we even reported on the supposed launch of being able to use these guitar controllers on Fortnite Festival. But the fans who actually tried to get them working found that a lot of the advertising, was not confusing or misleading, but downright incorrect.
We’ll start off with part of a thread about the issue from aWiseMoose on Twitter:
“Right now Festival locks Pro mode behind 3 specific guitar peripherals: the Rock Band 4 Stratocaster, the Rock Band 4 Jaguar, and the new Riffmaster that most people don’t even have yet. The initial messaging was that ALL RB4 compatible guitars would work in Festival.”
aWiseMoose then shares a table, which explains that the PlayStation branded controllers don’t work on Xbox or PC versions of Fortnite Festival, and that the Xbox branded controllers don’t work on the PlayStation version of the game. Furthermore, the PlayStation Rock Band controllers cannot be used with Fortnite Festival at all.
We’re getting back to aWiseMoose later, because there are other complaints from other people. As revealed by Jason Paradise, the PDP Riffmaster controller, which is branded for PlayStation, does not work on PlayStation 4, at all. Epic has shared a workaround after learning about this issue, but of course, this is not one that should exist at all.
Meanwhile, KhronicKyle has shared some pictorial evidence that PDP originally advertised their PDP Riffmaster PlayStation controller to work on PC, and then acted to cover it up. This is the outright false advertising that PDP made to consumers, but aWiseMoose has his own take on this particular issue.
Paraphrasing aWiseMoose now, he points out that PDP only said that the controller works on PC, not that it would work for the game Fortnite Festival on PC. So, if you play the many fan mods and fan created games around music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, you can use the PDP Riffmaster PlayStation controller.
But, obviously, this was misleading to those consumers who bought the controller to buy Fortnite Festival on PC. This technicality could be something that stands up in court, but it isn’t right to do to those gamers who preordered this controller.
It’s all really unfortunate for the people who were looking forward to playing Fortnite Festival, and even though the big issues around the Riffmaster are particularly the fault of PDP, the broader issues around compatibility are the responsibility of Epic Games, as well as Sony and Microsoft, and the other guitar controller makers. If Epic was the only company that was certain they could pull this off, they need to explain what’s going on to their consumers and what they’ll do about it.
