What the Heck is Going on With the Fortnite Item Shop Lately?

I know this will come off as whiny, and maybe it is a little, but I’m really disappointed with the Fortnite Item Shop lately compared to how it used to be. Gone are the days of waiting eagerly for the daily reset to see what’s new; now, it’s almost not worth looking at. It’s more of an “I guess I’ll check if they added anything good today.”

To be fair to Epic Games, they do refresh the content pretty regularly. But the quality of said content has really dipped in the last year, with a lot of the same emotes and skins being cycled through over and over. For example, the Invincible collaboration has been in the Fortnite Item Shop six times this year already, and The Weeknd skin appeared for 73 days straight, only just leaving the Shop days ago.

This may not seem like much to complain about, but it’s gone downhill when you look at the Fortnite Item Shop now compared to prior years. This was pointed out on Reddit lately with a post with 4,700 upvotes at the time of writing, showing the selection from March 14, 2021, which included skins like Xenomorph, Chun-Li, The Walking Dead, and Kratos. In contrast, March 14 of this year had the Invincible collaboration (again), some generic Fortnite skins, and a handful of emotes.

“I wish this was the selection we had today,” the top comment reads, with 1,500 upvotes. You can literally feel the pain in that sentence. Another describes the current state of the Fortnite Item Shop: “Now the shop is bloated with IRL music, overpriced LEGO sh*t, car cosmetics and… instruments. Oh and I can’t forget the same rotation of skins every other day.”

And that’s just it. The shop is now bloated with so many additions for Fortnite modes other than Battle Royale, which isn’t a bad thing in itself. I personally love Fortnite Festival and go feral whenever a new song I like is added. But the point is that real estate has been taken up for good cosmetics and emotes rather than being implemented alongside them. Why can’t we have both?

I will give credit where credit’s due here: Epic Games does a lot to ensure Fortnite’s Battle Pass rewards are fantastic, not to mention the additional cosmetics you can earn from quest rewards and bonus content, such as Solid Snake from Metal Gear in Chapter 5 Season 1 and the upcoming The Legend of Korra collaboration in Chapter 5 Season 2. They give you something to look forward to each Season, unlike the daily refresh of the Item Shop.

It just baffles me how Epic Games seems not to want money. I’m so down to spend V-Bucks on good cosmetics, which I’ve rarely been able to do in recent months. If you look on social media whenever the daily refresh happens, you’ll see this sentiment echoed often around the community. A community is rarely willing to spend money on microtransactions (just look at the recent Dragon’s Dogma 2 MTX discourse), so Epic should realize how lucky it is to have a player base that’s willing to give them money so effortlessly; if only they’d give us better ways to spend it.