Millions of people are heading online every day to play Fortnite Battle Royale, the latest craze to take over the gaming community. The game may be free to play but it's making hundreds of millions of dollars for Epic Games thanks to over 45 million players around the world. According to Superdata, the game raked in over $125M alone in February of 2018. So how is Fortnite Battle Royale making so much money off of its players? The answer is simple: in game purchases.
In game purchases, or micro transactions, is a major way that free to play games generate revenue. Fortnite Battle Royale has an item shop that rotates cosmetic items and skins daily such as outfits, gliders, harvesting tools, and emotes. Items are purchased by using V-Bucks, Fortnite's online currency. There are four pricing tiers when purchasing V-Bucks:
- 1000 V-Bucks: $9.99
- 2,500 (+300 Bonus) V-Bucks: $24.99
- 6,000 (+1,500 Bonus) V-Bucks: $59.99
- 10,000 (+3,500 Bonus) V-Bucks: $99.99
Each cosmetic item is assigned a color and rarity. Each rarity level is set at a different V-Bucks price. They are:
- Green (Uncommon): 800 V-Bucks
- Blue (Rare): 1,200 V-Bucks
- Purple (Epic): 1,500 V-Bucks
- Orange (Legendary): 2,000 V-Bucks
Players can also purchase a Battle Pass each season, which costs 1,000 V-Bucks. A Battle Pass gives players immediate rewards in game like cosmetic items, V-Bucks, and XP boosts. It also provides a list of weekly challenges to complete to earn further rewards. Challenges range from getting kills in certain areas of the map to hunting down treasure to using specific weapons or explosives to take out enemies. As quests are completed, players level up. The current reward for reaching Battle Tier 100 is The Reaper, one of Fortnite’s most popular skins.
The cosmetic items available for purchase in Fortnite Battle Royale offer no competitive advantage in game. They are purely for aesthetic purposes but players are still hooked on paying for them. When the mobile version of the game went live in the Apple Store last month, SensorTower estimated it made over $1.5M in the first three days alone through in game purchases.
What’s impressive about Fortnite Battle Royale’s success isn’t even the massive amount of players logging on each day to play. It’s that they’ve created an in game shop full of items that players can’t throw their money at fast enough, despite the fact that it doesn’t help them get any closer to a Victory Royale.
