Fortnite’s Item Shop Has Become An Increasingly Annoying Labyrinth Of Frustration

Prices are a mess since the latest price change

The latest price increase, back in the spring, was an example of shrinkflation–the prices stayed the same, but the amounts of V-Bucks you’d receive for your purchase went down. It used to be that $23 got you 2,800 V-Bucks, but now it’s 2,400, and the other standard amounts have been adjusted similarly. On top of that, Epic added a new “exact purchase” feature that would allow you to purchase only the specific amount required for the thing you want to buy. That sounds good in theory, but it’s a horrendous value given the way Epic implemented it.

How it works is that it charges you two different rates within the same transaction. Let’s use the new Lil Tecca bundle, which costs 2,600 V-Bucks, as an example. If you use the “exact amount” feature to purchase 2,600 V-Bucks, you’ll pay $27–the first 2,400 costs $23 ($.95 per 100 V-Bucks), and the other 200 costs $4 ($2 per 100 V-Bucks). That might be tolerable in small amounts, but the value becomes increasingly terrible the more you’re spending.

Fortnite caps the price to use the “exact amount” just below that of the next tier of V-Bucks, meaning that if you’re buying less than 4,500 V-Bucks with the “exact amount” feature, you will always pay less than the $37 that a 4,500 pack costs. But since using this feature is so exorbitantly expensive, you’ll reach that cap by purchasing just 3,100 V-Bucks. And that means that using the “exact amount” feature to purchase any amount of V-Bucks between 3,100 and 4,400 will cost exactly $36.49. So if you were to use this feature to buy the Addison Rae bundle for 3,600 V-Bucks, you’d be shorting yourself 900 V-Bucks to save 50 cents.

The price change and the expensive top-up are changes that work in tandem, because so many past shop bundles were oriented around the 2,800 V-Buck pack. I suspect that was one of the reasons Epic opted to shrink the V-Buck packs instead of raising prices again, because it theoretically pushes folks toward the unreasonable “exact amount” purchase or encourages them to get a bigger pack of V-Bucks instead.

Fortunately for players, Epic has been offering more new shop bundles that actually line up with the new V-Buck amounts–Harley and Ivy, The Odyssey, Spider-Man, and David Beckham all received bundles that cost 2,400 or less, taking most of the friction out of the process for those items. But there are still plenty of new bundles that go beyond that price, like the recent Addison Rae, Lil Tecca, and Supergirl bundles.

Shop FOMO is out of control

There are more than 2,000 item shop skins, and just over half of them have appeared in the item shop at any point in the past four months. There are only a few dozen skins available to buy on any given day, there seems to be a limit on how many collabs they can have available at the same time, and the most popular Fortnite-original items rotate through over and over (like Aura, who appears in the shop several days every month) while less popular ones disappear indefinitely (like this cool bag man, who first appeared in the shop for three days last June and has never returned). Even collabs frequently suffer a similar fate–just ask any of the Attack on Titan or Transformers or God of War fans who’ve been waiting years to see those skins return. Similarly, they seem to only sell Star Wars cosmetics in May now. 

The takeaway here is that it’s not easy to shop for the things you want in Fortnite, because only a tiny portion of the game’s cosmetics are available at a time. For Epic, that’s always been the point–the FOMO system encourages you to watch the shop change every day and leap into action when something you want comes back. But if there’s too much friction in that process, or if buying stuff routinely requires too much math and other mental effort, it can sour folks on the shop entirely.

Other shenanigans

Along with these broad, all-encompassing strategies, it appears that Epic has also been trying various other, more low-key techniques to boost sales both directly and indirectly.

• Since the Great AdiraFNInfo Incident back in the spring, in which Epic sued one of its former contractors for leaking upcoming collaborations, the Fortnite leaks scene has pretty much disappeared. This makes it harder to plan ahead, because we have much less of a sense of whether there’s anything on the way worth saving our V-Bucks for.

• Epic has been frequently bringing back items individually, without the accessories that go with them or the bundles they belong to, which has been frustrating for folks who like having the full set. Sometimes they even return a skin and all its accessories but still leave out the bundle anyway, which essentially raises the price of the set.

• Over the past few months I’ve noticed a lot of strangely jumbled shop sections, like the above tab from the Toon Takeover section on June 15. It’s impossible to tell with any confidence if the way this whole section was arranged–the above was one of six tabs of items and bundles from Futurama, Adventure Time, and Phineas and Ferb that were seemingly tossed together in a random order–was on purpose or just incompetence. But putting things in an order that people can’t make sense of and deemphasizing the bundles so they look like just another item in the pile sounds more like a sales technique than it does an accident. Fortunately, we haven’t seen this phenomenon pop up since Hot Bat Summer began in late July, so either they fixed the problem or stopped using this strategy, whatever the case actually was.

The thing you have to keep in mind about all of this is that every irritation we’ve talked about here compounds with each other, and it ultimately creates a buying experience in which discerning customers are constantly frustrated, and undiscerning customers are overpaying without realizing it.