Epic Games is making one of its biggest changes ever to Fortnite next week–the items on the upcoming Chapter 5 Season 4 battle pass will be the first in the game’s history that aren’t exclusive to the season they belong to. Starting with the upcoming season that begins on August 16, battle-pass cosmetics can be made available for sale in the Fortnite item shop starting 18 months after the end of the season.
This is a massive change because all previous battle-pass cosmetics have been sold under the pretense that they will never be available. Skins like Darth Vader and Optimus Prime are permanently unobtainable because of this longstanding exclusivity. While those past skins will remain exclusive, new battle-pass items will not be. This change marks a necessary long-term shift in Epic’s strategy for Fortnite as it continues to grow into a larger ecosystem. Battle pass exclusivity made sense for a fledgling battle royale, but it makes less sense for a full-blown metaverse.
In it’s announcement about the change, Epic specifically noted licensed characters as a reason for the move. “We want players down the road to enjoy battle-pass content such as Outfits based on popular licensed characters,” Epic’s statement read.
So here’s the nitty gritty of this. Starting with the Chapter 5 Season 4 battle pass, Epic will have the option to sell battle-pass cosmetics 18 months after the season ends. It doesn’t mean it definitely will sell everything in the shop right way or at all, but they’ll have the option to do so. They may also declare that certain items in a pass will be exclusive, but they will be clearly labeled as such when that happens.
Meanwhile, it sounds as though purchasing battle-pass skins in the shop will be expensive–Epic indicates that each style of a skin will have to be purchased separately. But even though this change is being announced now, it’ll be nearly two years before we actually see how this works. It’s not currently even possible for Fortnite to sell skins the way this announcement describes, so there’s some major work to be done.
While it would be easy to blame to recent item shop anomalies for forcing this change–namely the accidental sale of a battle-pass song last week, and the accidental return of The Paradigm on Tuesday–it could be that this was already a planned change ahead of the new season. Chapter 5 Season 4 has long been rumored to be a new Marvel-focused season, with a pass consisting entirely of Marvel characters–exactly the sort of situation that would warrant this change.
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