According to Epic Games, the cost of running Fortnite has "gone up a lot", and so it wants its playerbase to help pay the increased bills. To do this, it's raising the price of V-Bucks, the game's premium currency.
"The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills," the company rather bluntly states in an eye-opening first sentence. From 19th March 2026, you'll get fewer V-Bucks from a purchased pack. Here's a table of all the changes from Epic Games:
|
Pack |
Previous |
New |
|
$8.99 Pack |
1,000 V-Bucks |
800 V-Bucks |
|
$22.99 Pack |
2,800 V-Bucks |
2,400 V-Bucks |
|
$36.99 Pack |
5,000 V-Bucks |
4,500 V-Bucks |
|
$89.99 Pack |
13,500 V-Bucks |
12,500 V-Bucks |
|
Exact Amount Pack |
~$0.50 for 50 V-Bucks |
$0.90 for 50 V-Bucks |
While the price of a V-Bucks pack hasn't changed, you're getting fewer V-Bucks for your money, and the cost of each one inside the pack has gone up. Therefore, you'll need to pay more money to get the standalone skins you want.
To reflect this, the cost of a Battle Pass in Fortnite is being lowered to 800 V-Bucks, where it was 1,000 V-Bucks before. If you manage to finish a Battle Pass, you'll still earn enough V-Bucks through the reward tiers to purchase the next one, but there are no longer any additional V-Bucks in the Bonus Rewards part.
If you subscribe to Fortnite Crew, which offers monthly rewards and bonuses to members, you'll also receive 200 fewer V-Bucks from that program.
What do you make of this? Post your thoughts in the comments below.
[source fortnite.com]
Comments 41
They must be taking the piss. “To pay the bills” haha like the bills aren’t being paid already 🤣
Are they taking the you pee anyway i woudnt play fortnite if they payed me
Well at least they went the deflation rather than the inflation route to implement it
Thankfully this won’t affect me in the slightest.
Are the bills in the room with us right now?
Thank god I don't play Fortnite, what an absolute con. The amount of money they already have coming in isn't enough?
At least they're up front about ripping people off I suppose.
Fingers crossed Rockstar set up a GoFundMe to get GTA VI over the line.
"To pay the bills"
Like they are a struggling indie studio just trying to survive in this cold world 😢
Hopefully Apple can have a Kickstarter for the next iPhone. 🙏
After 4 years of playing and spending well over €500 on the game I finally quit the game over this.
In the meantime, let's all have a whip-round for Nvidia and Amazon.
Who's in?
Europe brings in rules to stop dark patterns > live service games raise prices 🤣 all live service players deserve everything they get.
It’s remarkable how these megacorps can make record profits while ordinary people are struggling to pay bills, and yet they still just have to increase prices.
Have never played this game and never will
lol that's hilarious bankrupt in a fortnight fingers crossed.
Wait, so the game that generates 6 billion a year, needs help to pay the bills. Even if only 20% of that is profit, that is still alot of money. Guess stakeholders wanted some more dosh
So the shareholders are demanding more money more like
To be that candid on what is simply the most successful Live Service game is incredibly weird... Is even this game struggling to find the format sustainable off of a single IP?
Is the GaaS burnout beginning to show itself?
I’d like to see their p&l spreadsheet. At least they aren’t reducing their cogs by eliminating staff right now.
Really crass way to announce this to your players.
I guess if there's a silver lining, MAYBE this means no one will get laid off? And, while reducing the BP price is nice, it's still absolutely insane that we need to help "pay their bills".
I stopped playing around the holidays after a few years. No reason, just did. I paid about $8 for however many?-bux back then to buy a season pass. I stopped playing with about 3,000 V-bux left. If I ever did go back to playing it I wonder if my V-bux will still be there?
Not that I really need them anyway, I have way more skins than anyone could ever need. Game is free to play for real.
Sir, would you not think of the rich?
My kids don’t play Fortnite anymore. You know, I gotta pay the bills…
Disney not coughing up enough cash then?
I wish they’d say what they mean. It’s not to help pay the bills, it’s to keep profit margins crazy high.
I've never played Fortnite, and I'm no economist, but if the table shows all of the available ways to get the in-game currency, I foresee a problem.
It's to be expected that sales go down whenever prices go up, but the aim is for that to be counteracted by increased profit margins from customers who remain. Instead here, while the per-unit prices have gone up, the packs themselves are the same prices as before, just with lower returns of in-game currency. There might be some players who buy regularly and are willing to continue paying the same price for less in return, but given the size differences between packs, I doubt there are many who will decide to pay more to upgrade to the larger pack: if the packs are the same price but of lesser value, that will just shrink the customer base with no counterbalancing increase in profit margin. And V-Bucks are just a made-up digital resource that are freely reproducible whose only use (I presume) is to exchange for other made-up digital resources that are freely reproducible and have no use outside of Fortnite, so it's not like they can take the unsold product and sell it elsewhere or use it for anything else. The only direction this can make revenue go is down.
I've seen a lot of bad business, which rips off customers but ostensibly drives a profit, but this is just incompetent business.
I stopped playing during this current season, after playing and completing every battle pass since C2S4. I just hated how they nerfed xp in creative and it became too much of a grind. They made it not fun anymore.
Everything is shrinkflation these days.
Time to change to another game and send a message to Epic. Go enjoy your delicious backlog of games.
If you think Fortnite is the biggest game in the world, you don't understand Roblox.
basement dwellers still can't understand that producing a product costs money. Production costs increase? Well what do you think happened next? "Gamers" have the same mentality of junkies and think they deserve everything for free.
Last year Epic generated around $6 Billion revenue from Fortnite alone and that's not enough to pay the bills? Goodness gracious 😮
People really need to stop paying for this rubbish.
Shrinkflation for not even a digital product, but a digital currency is insane.
Margins are getting slimmer, the cost of hardware upgrades is skyrocketing along with the cost of energy. This makes perfect sense to maintain both margins and growth. It's an interesting way to implement it. I don't understand the vitriol here. They're raising the prices on optional cosmetic content to offset the cost of continuing to do business. I'd rather see them continue to employ their devs and charge a little more for skins.
The funny part? They are returning to google play and only having 20% instead of 30% cut taken.
Lmaooo
@IntrepidWombat They make billions from vbucks lmao.
Even if they have to pay a half a billion on staff, server costs, overheads, etc, they are still making BANK
@TechaNinja Oh, that's cool. Can you share with me where you were able to access and read their P&L? They're a private company, so I wasn't able to find it.
@IntrepidWombat I ain't google bro.
Look it up yourself and stop defending the corpos lmao
@TechaNinja Translation: "I don't know what I'm talking about, I've never run a business, and I'm just here to say what everyone else is saying because it's cool to hate corporations." Thanks for the clarification, bro.
@IntrepidWombat 🤓🤓🤓🤓
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