One of the most contentious topics in the Fortnite community is the one surrounding its many exclusive cosmetics that may never be available to obtain ever again. As it stands now, folks have been fighting about this for years, with a lot of players arguing that it’s only right that new players get a chance at those classic battle pass skins like Drift or Peely. But this is actually a legal question, rather than something we could put to a vote, so these discussions rarely get anywhere near the heart of the matter.
At issue is Fortnite’s FOMO-based system of microtransactions. In the first few years of Fortnite, Epic leaned hard on exclusivity as a motivating tool. The idea was that if you saw a player using a skin that you like but can’t have, it would encourage you to grind out future battle passes and pick up anything you think is cool from the shop as soon as possible. But once it became clear that Fortnite might be around for decades, Epic realized that it’s not so good to have ultra-famous characters like Darth Vader permanently locked behind an old battle pass that can never be purchased again.
These days, Fortnite almost never releases any new exclusives. Every free or promotional item now comes with a disclaimer that it could pop up in the item shop later, and battle pass items from Chapter 5 Season 4 (pictured above) and on can now hit the shop 18 months after the season ends, and the first of these landed in the item shop together on June 28: Gwenpool, Peelverine, Mysterio, Captain Jones, and War Machine. You can feel confident that any new cosmetic that pops up these days will eventually hit the shop, unless it says so very clearly on the item page.
It’s a very different situation than it used to be. There are tons of items from older passes, as well as lots of other old cosmetics, that remain stuck in exclusivity hell, and many other cosmetics whose status is ambiguous and hard to gauge. Thanks to Epic’s hard pivot away from exclusivity the last couple of years, and the natural cycling in and out of players, they’ve created an environment where it can be hard to figure out what old skins are actually exclusive and which ones aren’t, because nobody’s really been keeping track as we went. At least not accurately.
But that’s what this article is ultimately about–sorting out which Fortnite cosmetics actually are exclusive, and which ones are not. Below, we’ll break it all down as best we can–but keep in mind that Epic’s lawyers may be the only ones who really have the answers here. But since they aren’t going to be sharing that info with us, this piece is the next best thing. Let’s dive in.
Skins that are permanently exclusive and will not return
Any battle pass skin from Chapter 1 Season 2 through Chapter 5 Season 3
Everything in this era is truly exclusive. This is because Epic promoted the passes as the only way to ever get the included items. The battle pass FAQ used to say this during Chapter 2 Season 7: “Rewards from a Battle Pass can only be earned in that season, and will not be available in later seasons.” The back half of that sentence–“will not be available in later seasons”–is not ambiguous at all. So if Epic were to sell items from one of those old passes, that quote would suddenly become false, and that would, in turn, open the company to litigation and fines. Very few old battle pass skins could hypothetically sell well enough to be worth the potential price. There are 222 skins that fall into this category, which represents just 8% of all Fortnite skins.
Examples:
- The Reaper
- Drift
- Peely
- Skye
- Aquaman
- Mystique
- Groot
- Rick Sanchez
- Predator
- Doctor Strange
- Darth Vader
- Indiana Jones
- Spider-Gwen
- Geralt of Rivia
- Eren Yeager
- Optimus Prime
- Solid Snake
- Peter Griffin
- T-60 Power Armor
Free Winterfest 2019 skins
Epic’s blog post announcing the first Winterfest claimed that the free cosmetics from the Winterfest lodge would be “exclusive to this year’s Winterfest!” This was the only Winterfest where they described the rewards that way.
Items:
- Lt. Evergreen
- Wooly Warrior
Anything in the shop that was marketed as “exclusive.”
The Fortnite Championship Series-themed Major Glory and The Champion were each sold in the item shop as a “time-limited exclusive,” which is pretty clear. Likewise, The Paradigm skin and its accompanying emote were promoted on Twitter with this claim: “These exclusive items are only available for a limited time.” And, in 2024 when The Paradigm mistakenly returned to the shop for two hours, Epic confirmed its status as a permanent exclusive.
Partial exclusives or grey areas
Skins in this category probably can return, but due to the use of certain wording in their promotions, they might remain exclusive to the method through which they were previously available. In some cases, that makes them essentially exclusive, if not literally–since you probably can’t play Fortnite on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 these days anyway. But most of the skins here don’t face that sort of obstacle, and those could come back any time.
