Parents hiring coaches to help their kids get better at playing Fortnite



NEW YORK -- Forget reading, writing and arithmetic.

The Wall Street Journal recently found several families are now hiring tutors to teach their kids ... how to win at Fortnite.

The report says some are paying upward of $50 an hour for video game experts to help their kids with their playing skills.

The basic concept of the game involves 100 gamers who are dropped on a virtual island and fight to be the last player standing.

Some of the parents interviewed by WSJ said they hoped their children would turn their video game hobby into a future career or use it to get scholarships. Some parents also said hiring video game coaches would be the same as hiring coaches to help with basketball or other activities.

There's also the chance that if their kids are good enough at the game, they could win a chunk of a $100 million competitive prize pool.

The game exploded to more than 125 million players in a matter of months, developer Epic Games says, and is now set to offer $100 million worth of prize money to be split among events at different levels of qualifying competition across the world.

For perspective, the total prize money awarded in 2017 for all e-sports was around $112 million.  the developers of "Fortnite" say they plan to hold a first-of-its-kind World Cup for the game in 2019.