It is some time that I had in mind to make this post.

What is Fortnite?

Fortnite is the famous and world popular game from Epic Games. It was launched in 2017 with "Save the World" mode, but became widely popular when with the launch of the "Battle Royale" mode.

Today there are more than 400 millions registered users between consoles and PC (and more than 50% of that are active monthly).

The game is free to play, has no "pay to win" mechanics for multiplayer mode, and the main revenue is from the "skins" (cosmetic items that modify the appearance of player/weapons etc.). These are sold from Epic Games on an internal market. There are skins for the player character, back bling (more or less a backpack), melee weapon, glider (more or less a parachute), contrail. Emotes, weapon coatings, banners, menu music and loading screen can also be bought.

Locker room with all the customizable options.

Price in the Fortnite Item Shop is in "V-Bucks" (in game premium currency) and varies from few dollars up to 30/40$ on the most expensive ones.

Fortnite Item Shop - on the top right there is the in-game currency, the \"V-Bucks\".

There are currently more than 1,526 player character skins in Fortnite, some of them are very rare (battle pass skins cannot be obtained anymore), while others are more common and come back in the market often. Some skins can be obtained for free from events or during specific days (for example Christmas season). In the last 2 years there were big collaboration with Disney, Marvel, DC Comics etc., with in-game events and skins sold in the marketplace.

Darth Vader from Star Wars, a Fortnite's Collab/Crossover skin.

The revenue for Epic Games, from Fortnite alone was 5.8 BILLION Dollars in 2021.

Source and other statistics

Fortnite is played not only by young gamers but also from people more aged. Casual players and hardcore gamers play it or played it in the past.

NFTs, Reddit's Collectible Avatars and NFTs in gaming

Now, back at our main topic. NFTs stand for NonFungible Token, and is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain. It become popular when NFTs images, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, started to be bought and sold at high prices.

However, while some NFTs company tried to tie real life benefits to those NFTs (such as access to a private online club, exclusive in-person events, and intellectual property rights for the image etc.), many people still think that NFTs are "useless" and without a real purpose.

In some cases they also have been used for money laundering.

In July 2022m, during a bear market for crypto, Reddit launched the first Collectible Avatars collection with prices between 10$ and 100$. After a while they launched a free airdrop of NFTs Avatars to eligible users and this lead to a big and wide adoption on the website. Avatars started to be traded on OpenSea (one of the main NFTs market) at quite high price and with a lot of transactions. Here there is the detailed story of Reddit's Collectible Avatars .

Reddit's NFT avatars lead to a renewal of interest to NFTs and the launch of Gen 2 and others free airdrops lead to a massive adoption throughout the website, however, outside Reddit, they are still seen just as "images" with no real value.

In 2022 Ubisoft launched Quartz, a platform for NFT in some of their games. NFT were applied to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint but they had little success. The game was already in it's dawn and the NFT weapons were only few and not so strong. Also the platform was not user-friendly.

Ubisoft, at the beginning of 2023, cancelled "project Q", a NFT game under development.

Currently NFTs are not present in AAA games, but are limited to some browser games and mobile games. Some project are under development but there is no massive adoption in sight, at least in the next months.

Fornite skins as NFTs

Last years there were some articles about Epic welcoming blockchain games, in contrast to Valve banning or opposing NFT's games on Steam.

While Epic stated that is not planning to introduce NFTs on Fortnite, my analysis want to underline that, if it will happen in the future, it will be absolutely groundbreaking.

Let's consider, hypothetically, that Epic Games updates Fortnite with NFTs, transforming all skins within the game to signle NFTs (minting), assigning them a progressive number based on when they were acquired.

Then, players could trade those skins directly inside Fortnite or on secondary market such as OpenSea. A sales commission on every transfer will be earned by Epic, boosting their revenue even more.

Players with very rare skins could want to sell them due to their high value and become more interested in the crypto world, being incentivized to create Reddit's vault-like wallets, connecting them to MetaMask and starting using crypto services.

Skins as NFTs could be seen as a real "assets", due to the fact that they can be really "used" in the game despite being only "digital".

An \"old\" and \"rare\" Chapter 1 Season 3 skin. It was released in 2018 as a Twitch prime promotion and never came back in the game.

Adoption of NFTs in a game such as Fortnite will lead, for sure, to a more common adoption in the gaming industry, especially for free to play games. While I love single player games (such as Elden Ring), NFTs are a perfect companion for F2P games where there are cosmetic items that can be bought.

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What do you think about my analysis? I am right/wrong?

Are you in favor or against the introduction of NFTs in games such as Fortnite?

Do you agree that introduction of NFTs in game such as Fortnite could lead to a massive adoption?

Discuss and comment freely!

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This is not a financial advice. This post is just a discussion on a topic.

While commenting, please respect other's opinion (and mine)!

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^{Fortnite, V-Bucks, skins in the images above are propriety/under copyright of Epic Games inc.. Images are screenshot taken by me inside Fortnite app just to let users understand this topic.}

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Edit: just to inform you all, this post was removed this morning by the automoderator bot, to due the fact that were already present 2 posts regarding "NFT" in the top 50 (see here for details).