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There have been all sorts of Fortnite item-shop anomalies over the past year and a half, but things have gotten exceptionally weird lately. We’re about a week away from a new season, but every Fortnite diehard has their focus on the same thing today: the item shop. The news that items and skins from future battle passes will be eligible to be sold in the shop starting 18 months after the end of each season is just the capper (so far) on a week in which the item shop simply refused to be normal. Following months of the item shop seeming unhinged and uncontrollable, this week has given us our most surprising item shop gaffes yet.
Let’s run down the current strangeness. Last week, the item shop briefly sold a jam track from last season’s battle pass in the shop, before Epic hid it from the shop and forced refunds to those who purchased it. Also last week, every item in the shop claimed it was leaving on August 6, even though items in the shop never rotate in or out as one collective like that. After that didn’t happen, everything shifted to saying it would rotate out on August 13, which is just as untrue.
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The most significant goof of them all came this past Tuesday; Epic accidentally sold The Paradigm skin for the first time since it was released in 2019–despite the fact that it was advertised and sold back then as an exclusive release timed to the Season X finale event. It was intended to never be sold again. For Fortnite’s most diehard digital collectors, to say the surprise was monumental would be a dramatic understatement–it was, honestly, as much of a shocker as the change to battle pass exclusivity would be 12 hours later, and it kicked off a pretty bizarre evening.
Epic’s first response to the accident was to remove The Paradigm from the item shop after an hour without any comment on the situation. An hour after that, Epic declared that it would, as with the Swim Free jam track from the Chapter 5 Season 2 battle pass popping up in the shop last week, be refunding new buyers and removing the skin from their lockers. Another hour later, Epic reversed course and declared that anyone who purchased The Paradigm during its brief return window would be refunded and also get to keep the skin.
Those who had it back in the day will get a new, exclusive alternate style to prove their status as an OG, as well as a new option to refund their purchase from half a decade ago, just in case some players are annoyed by the fact that the item’s rarity has unexpectedly changed in an instant.
So yes, that’s right: If you were among those who scrambled to buy The Paradigm on Tuesday, you’re getting it for free; you should receive a refund in V-Bucks within a few days.
The response from the community to all of this was immediately vociferous. About four hours after the shop reset, the top six topics on the Fortnite subreddit were about The Paradigm and how Epic had handled the situation. Because the skin was so rare and important to the Fortnite storyline in the past, lots of folks had been waiting a very long time to purchase it–Fortnite previously included a Brie Larson version of this character in the Chapter 3 Season 4 battle pass as an alternative. At the same time, a lot of players who had The Paradigm originally were angry that the skin was available again after it had been sold to them as an exclusive–some of those people had undoubtedly only bought it because of that alleged exclusivity.
While the inclusion of The Paradigm in the shop was seemingly an error, it was one that actually required some effort. The Fortnite item shop looks extremely different than it did in 2019. Presumably, all the shop assets related to The Paradigm would have had to be updated by an actual person to meet the current item shop’s aesthetic standards.
Epic’s decision to both give new purchasers their V-Bucks back and allow them to keep the skin is likely a consequence of a lot of people spending real human currency on V-Bucks to buy it. It’s no exaggeration to say there are people who have been checking the item shop daily for years for exactly this moment, despite having no reason to think it would ever actually happen. This is in sharp contrast with the Swim Free jam track, which carried no demand whatsoever since it was available for free to anyone who played Fortnite during last season.
So while Epic can unilaterally issue V-Buck refunds for these purchases, the real-money purchases to obtain those V-Bucks would still need to be addressed, and that’s a far more complicated thing with platform holders like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo having to be involved. Giving buyers their V-Bucks back and also letting them keep the purchase is the path of least resistance–and it builds a little goodwill among some of Fortnite’s most hardcore users in the process. But it also once again demonstrates how oddly out-of-control the Fortnite item shop continues to be month after month, or even day after day at some points over the last year and change.
From the outside, all this remains a confusing–and admittedly somewhat amusing–mystery. The shop doesn’t have a mind of its own, so why does the system that operates the digital store seem so indecipherable to its creators? Suppose Epic doesn’t intend to sell a particular item. How does it keep happening that for periods of minutes or days at a time, several times dating back for more than a year now, such items keep becoming available for purchase? The financial cost of these mistakes may prove to be a mere rounding error for the video game giant, but the reputational cost is arguably more severe by routinely frustrating and/or confusing the game’s most dedicated players. Also, consider this sort of thing probably doesn’t look great to the government agencies and regulatory bodies that have already been scrutinizing Fortnite’s item shop practices for years.
This whole ordeal with The Paradigm also demonstrates why Epic is only planning to bring back items from future battle passes and not the current and old ones–beyond just the myriad potential legal issues doing so might create. The uproar about The Paradigm was immense despite the fact that, realistically, few people actually owned it. Battle pass skins, by extreme contrast, are the most commonly owned skins, and so there would be far more people who actually cared about whether they come back–the fighting about it would never end. It’s just a mess Epic doesn’t need to step in right now. So for the foreseeable future, do-overs, like the current Deadpool and Wolverine shop skins, will continue to be the way Epic creatively brings back battle pass items.
We’ll keep monitoring the enigmatic Fortnite item shop for accidental re-releases, regrettable refunds, and other head-scratching items for sale.
