Epic Games made an announcement; the Riot Fortnite community is on the move. Finally, starting with October 14, players will be able to pay exactly for their purchases in terms of V-Bucks. This has literally been the players’ desire for years and now, it’s actually coming.
The announcement was officially plotted in a tweet from the Fortnite Twitter account. The reactions were very expected. This has been asked forever, and on these replies members celebrate along with, “well it’s about time.” One user even went so far as to say, “Finally! An actual W update!” just about sums the general feeling.
So how does it work? For those that may not know: V-Bucks are the in-game currency of Fortnite that players use to purchase skins, emotes, battle passes, and a variety of other cosmetic items. Traders have only been allowed to buy selected limited amounts—Be it 1,000, 2,800, 5,000, and so on. Therefore, if a purchase costs 1,200 V-Bucks, for example, players would then have to go ahead and buy the 1,000 pack and the 100 pack, which leaves them with all the leftover currency waiting to be spent. Psychological tricks like that are really well implemented in many free-to-play games.
With Exact Amount, you buy only as much V-Bucks as necessary for the purchase. No leftover, no complicated addition and subtraction; just buy the skin you’ve been saving for. This is actually an extremely nice gesture towards the customers from Epic Games, which is kind of surprising, as those leftover V-Bucks might just be a large share of their revenue.
The reactions to the announcement were amusing. One said, “Say I only need 10 V-Bucks will it cost .10?” which… I mean, technically yes? But who only needs 10 V-Bucks? That’s like someone needing one more penny to buy a candy bar. Another said, “I have not bought V-Bucks for years and 100% never will, might consider it if you remove the 5% deadzone lock,” showing that players have other grievances about the NC mechanics despite this welcome change.
Save The World founders are also worried about how this would affect their earnings from missions, with multiple users asking if this change affects V-Bucks that can be earned through gameplay instead of being bought. Weirdly relevant, as STW founders have had that perk for ages.
Then good old Fortnite Twitter had to take over with bug complaints, collaboration inquiries, and one guy saying the game’s dying because of its “7 yr old” age. Like, bro, Fortnite is still raking in crazy amounts, but ok.
As interesting as it is, it’s really a bit mind-boggling how long people have been asking for this. One user said, “We’ve been only asking since forever. But finally,” which honestly sounds accurate. I remember seeing threads about exactly this request for the past few years, going back to maybe 2018. Such a really simple thing really comes off as a quality-of-life improvement that seems glaringly obvious in hindsight but took them years to finally implement.
The timing couldn’t be more perfect- the holiday season is just around the corner and people with cash tend to burn money faster on in-game purchases. Hence, this put Epic at, probably, the smartest perch in the decision; the easier it is to spend money, the more money people are willing to spend. Basic economics right there.
Platform-specific drama starts drifting up in the replies with someone claiming, “All platforms but PlayStation because Sony is greedy.” Unconfirmed truth or just another nonsense about console wars; whichever it is, I would not be surprised if it’s true.
All around, this is a good update to solve some of the problems players have cried about forever. It stops one of the more annoying aspects of the Fortnite monetization scheme and makes it easy to get exactly what you want without doing weird arithmetic of some random leftover currency. Not all of the issues of the game will be solved with this- people are complaining about bugs, edit issues, and everything else that comes with Fortnite- but it is a step forward.
On the other hand, it has sort of made my point: just how dumb is it that the simplest thing in the world managed to take years? But hey, better late than never, right? Now, the next time one of those good looking skins drops and you’re short a weirdly specific 327 V-Bucks, you don’t have to buy an extra 473 for no reason. Little wins people, little wins.
So if any grievances about V-Bucks have touched you over the time, mark your calendar for October 14th. This one might actually resurrect me into spending money again. Hell, I haven’t bought V-Bucks since, like, Chapter 2. No joke—these past years, going on for many years have been all about Battle Pass earnings and Save The World V-Bucks. But being able to get just exactly what I want? That may—barely—might fall on the backside break my resistance.
So that’s the big news today, folks. Accurate V-Bucks coming in next month. If only somebody was able to fix those pesky editing bugs, anyways.
