Part 6: Cash Cow

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Fortnite is its monetization model. Players don't spend money to buy the game thanks to the free-to-play model, which pushes the responsibility of generating revenue toward in-game cosmetics and items. There are two layers to the approach used to get players to spend money on items. The first is the store, where the available items are rotated in and out and can be purchased individually. The second is the "battle pass", which offers a greater number of items for a lower cost, with the condition that items need to be "unlocked" by investing a considerable amount of time into playing the game within a certain window of time. Some predetermined items can be had without having to pay for the pass.

Both of these tactics employ "fear of missing out" as a driving force to get players to make purchases. This is a somewhat underhanded practice, but many free-to-play games (and some paid games!) released around the same time were utilizing "loot boxes" for their in-game purchase models. The names and specifics varied between the games that used them, but they generally utilized gambling as the driving component in encouraging purchases. After the massive commercial success of Fortnite, many new games started using "battle pass" models for their in-game purchases instead of loot boxes.

Introducing an effective alternative to gambling for monetizing free-to-play games is a positive attribute and something I appreciate about this game getting as popular as it did. Making the cosmetic components of games the only parts players need to pay money for seems like it wouldn't work on most. Fortnite can be played without any real hindrances for free as long as the cosmetic items aren't too tempting. Despite that, I rarely encountered a player who could have plausibly not spent money on the game. There must be an inherent human need for expression of self and individuality that makes us all the same. That, or there's some really compelling reason to spend money on virtual items instead of something useful like food or soap that I'm not thinking of.

These items can be, but are not limited to, player characters, melee weapons, emotes (dance moves, taunts, various animations for a player's character to do), and licensed music tracks that can be played as charts in the "Festival" game or as emotes in the battle royale mode. There are also ways of customizing the menu/lobby, with ways to change the background music and loading screen image, among other options. I think most of the menu customizations come from battle pass items and events as opposed to store purchases.

Most everything in the Fortnite store, including battle passes, are not directly purchased with money. The game uses an intermediate currency called "V-Bucks" that are purchased with money, then used to purchase in-game items. There appear to be some exceptions listed in the store, but I don't detect an obvious pattern for what to say those exceptions would be. The apparent reason for this intermediate currency is so the battle pass can include some as part of the unlockable items without it being considered money. V-Bucks can't be officially exchanged back into a standard currency, so there's technically no cash value to them.

A system like this also helps to obfuscate the listed value of items from what the asking price would be in dollars. I don't think deceiving consumers was one of Epic Games' primary intentions with the V-Bucks system. Actually, by having the purchase of the V-Bucks be taxed instead of the items, it's likely easier for the kids who play the game. Some of them might not understand why having the exact balance that matches the price tag isn't actually enough to make the purchase because of the taxes that need to be paid in addition to that list price.

Before talking about the prices of what can be purchased, it would be best for me to establish how I'm going to list the prices. The lowest-cost pack of V-Bucks available for purchase is 1,000 V-Bucks for $8.99 USD. Rounding that purchase price up to nine dollars, that makes the theoretical value of a V-Buck nine-tenths of one cent, or $0.009 USD. Hopefully by listing the value in boths cents and dollars I can avoid "Verizon Math" style misinterpretations from happening. Higher cost packages offer a volume discount, but $0.009 is the value I will be using to convert prices listed in V-Bucks to what the price would be if it was listed in dollars.

EDIT: Forgot to add link to the "Verizon Math" incident I was referring to. The really short version is that a billing rate for data was written as $0.002 (zero point zero zero two dollars, or two-tenths of one cent) but quoted over the phone as a number in cents instead of dollars, leading to a customer receiving a bill 100x greater than what it would have been if the billing rate's unit actually matched what he was told. This was another point where I needed to explain what I was talking about.
Verizon Math (Blogspot)

With that established, I can now express my thoughts on the store. The pricing for items seems ridiculous to me. The main reason I wanted to give Fortnite another try was because of the Avatar event and items. More specifically, I wanted to get Toph, which is what I decided to purchase first. The price tag was set at 2,000 V-Bucks (~$18). Understandably, I gawked a bit at seeing this. This wasn't my first time seeing and eventually purchasing a virtual item in a game set at a price that couldn't possibly be justified by any objective metric. Halo Infinite's (~$10) Enigma helmet took that within the first few days of the game's release in November 2021. I don't know what I was expecting, but that still seemed high.

Since caving to the fear of missing out and obtaining the Toph skin was one of the main reasons I was trying this game out again, I reluctantly headed to the page for buying the in-game currency and chose the 2,800 V-Bucks pack for $22.99. My decision was mostly determined by the only lower cost package of 1,000 V-Bucks not being enough to make the purchase unless I went through the process of buying that one twice. I would have enough to buy the Toph skin and some dance move emote and it was less inconvenient than going through checkout two times in a row. Sometime not long after I got the Toph skin, I decided to throw 500 (~$4.50) of the remaining balance at one of the dance move emotes, which is exactly what I thought would happen. Somehow, that's not even on the high end of what emotes can be listed for.

Near the end of the Avatar event, I decided that I had been suckered in enough to throw more money at the game to get the paid half of the Avatar event items (1,000 V-Bucks, ~$9.50) and the battle pass (950 V-Bucks, ~$8.55). I don't remember why I bought the latter other than to evaluate what going through a battle pass was like and develop a real opinion about it. That, or I just wanted to unlock the Korra-related items despite not having seen that show yet. Probably both. To facilitate these purchases, I dropped another $23 of real money to buy more of the Fortnite wacky bucks. The leftovers from that and the additional supply unlocked from the battle pass went into purchasing more goofy dances. A complete listing of what I got will be at the bottom of this section. Man, this stuff can get expensive fast.

Despite my clear objections to the prices charged, I end up buying these virtual items anyway. I have enough restraint to stick to buying ones that I know I will start using immediately and never stop using, which ends up applying to only a select few. Even with absurd prices, I can keep the total amount of money wasted to below $60. Because of that, I see the purchases I do make as being the alternative to paying an up-front cost for the game.

Continually adding new items for players to buy and rotating items in and out of the shop to create artificial scarcity and leverage fear of missing out to drive up sales is a formula that can result in overspending. Adding to this is the game's willingness to not make purchase history easily accessible. To the best that I can tell, there is no way to view the purchase history of an account in Fortnite itself. The transaction history of an Epic Games account can be viewed by logging into their website. As it pertains to Fortnite, that log will only show purchases of V-Bucks packages. Considering that these are what pull real money from consumers, this is the important information.

There doesn't seem to be a way of viewing a log of what those V-Bucks were spent on. Thanks to community-run websites that make pricing information for all shop items searchable, it's possible to make a list of every item an account has and look up the prices to manually create a record of what was purchased with the in-game currency. I've done this for the purchases I've made in the game. I didn't have the foresight to write them all down from the beginning due to not knowing that the game didn't have a way of viewing what its currency had been spent on. I couldn't imagine how long manually creating the in-game purchase log would take for accounts with lots of purchases over a long span of time.

Unfortunately, I did not find a good way to include some words about Unreal Tournament into this section. However, I'm doing it anyway. Near the end of 2022, Epic Games delisted Unreal, Unreal II, and every game in the Unreal Tournament series from all digital games storefronts. This has rendered them unavailable for purchase but left the people who already purchased copies of the games still able to play them. Additionally, they shut down the online components to the games that they were hosting, which doesn't affect the online playability of the games too significantly. To the best of my knowledge, there is no official explanation for why this was done.

EDIT: The fourth and never really completed Unreal Tournament game (usually referred to as "UT4") relied on central servers and was only available through the Epic Games Launcher on PC, so it's completely unplayable in an original state. It looks like there's a group offering their own solution for installing the game and connecting to their replacement master server, meaning it would still be playable. I don't know how I forgot to elaborate on that before. The older games were available on other platforms and as physical copies, with Epic only hosting master servers. These can be substituted for community ones and the game servers were all community-hosted anyway. With a few changes, these games will still work fine.

What the fuck, Epic Games? There couldn't possibly be a good explanation for delisting these games. A reasonable part of me thinks that this is an attempt to detach the Unreal engine from the games it was created for as part of an effort to increase the engine's expansion into other industries and use cases by reshaping its image to be less gaming-oriented. A cynical part of me thinks this is a way for Epic Games to bury their history of making great games to decrease the awareness of newer and more casual players and make it easier to present them new games that are "good" at best. A realistic part of me accepts that this was probably a decision made by an ignorant upper-management figure who didn't have any particularly good reasoning behind it. Whatever the logic behind it may be, it remains an unsolved issue that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. Technically, the only connection this has to Fortnite is the shared developer, but it still feels important to include this.
Epic is delisting almost every Unreal game... - PC Gamer

ADDITION: I made a spreadsheet template based on the spreadsheet seen below for other players to use if they'd like.
Purchase Spreadsheet Template

Listed Cost, V-Bucks: The price of the item as listed in the store.

Equivalent Cost (USD)

Theoretical: What the price might be if it was listed using standard currency instead of in-game currency. Meant to be representative of an approximate amount of real money purchasing the item would equate to.

Nearest Single: The list price of the lowest cost V-Bucks package with enough of the in-game currency to purchase the item. Meant to be representative of the amount of real money purchasing the item equates to assuming the account has no V-Bucks balance.

Nearest Mix: Differs from "Nearest Single" if a combination of V-Bucks purchases can provide the requisite balance at a lower cost than a single purchase. Meant to be representative of the amount of real money purchasing the item equates to assuming the account has no V-Bucks balance.

Has Exact: "Yes" if the listed price in V-Bucks matches exactly to an amount of V-Bucks in a package. Meant to represent if the item can be purchased without having a leftover balance of in-game currency.