Fortnite’s item shop has just been refreshed, and yes, so it’s going to be one of those days again. The famous leaker ShiinaBR checked out the new rotation and tweeted, ‘just looked at the new fortnite shop’ along with a photo, which pretty much said what everyone was thinking. And the replies? They are telling us everything, dude. Gamers are really angry. Not at all.
A big point that is being discussed regarding this new shop update is that not a lot of skins especially anime collaborations, which are really demanding, have been rotated. One user TanjiroAckerman is leading the charge, saying that the Naruto skins have not been in the item shop for over three years. Three years! And Attack on Titan? Two years. That’s like forever in Fortnite time. The gamers have been pleading for their return but it seems like Epic Games is just not able to hear them. Or maybe they hear them but pretend not to? That is the other side of this saga.
The discuss is going hot in the replies. Some gamers like Tait_FN argue that indeed Epic is rotating the anime skins and he even mentions My Hero Academia as being ‘every other month at this point’ for a reason. He even hints that certain collabs may be subject to permissions from rights holders for Epic to bring back. Which, of course, is quite a logical point. They likely cannot simply put Goku in the shop whenever they want. But then other gamers come back and say that’s not the core; the issue is that the rare collabs, the ones that people really want, are on a kind of permanent vacation.
All this controversy is just a reflection of a more general problem related to the item shop strategy of Fortnite. It feels like a rerun. DarknessGamings made a joke, ‘wait until January its even worse’ trying to suggest that this is just the tip of the boring iceberg. Another player Yoliebe captured the situation concisely by a resigned, ‘Like always lol.’ The players’ mood is plain: they are done with the same old skins while their most-wanted cosmetics are left untouched.
And among them, anime is not the only issue. The discussion opened up to other missed opportunities. User JeremiahMitch1 interrupted with ‘Need the Incredibles skins ngl’ implicitly indicating that the need for variety exists in all genres. Another player, TiTanSwan27, revealed that he/she thought that the community’s vocal feedback would result in bringing back older Crew skins and Battle Pass items, which they had seen in official surveys. Thus the demand is there, everywhere. People want the chance to get the things they have missed or the things they love that never return.
What is the most amusing of all is the part-conversation about the quality of the image leak. A very fuzzy picture was shared and someone mocked the poster with ‘Bro posting from the first Nokia‘. So the Fortnite community still manages to keep it light even in the midst of very serious complaints about the shop. It’s good to notice that.
So what is our stance? A new day, a new Fortnite item shop that comes with a large part of the player base feeling dissatisfied. The main issue seems to be a colossal difference between the expectation and the reality. While the characters from My Hero Academia may have a frequent rotation, the diamonds of past collaborations that have become highly sought after remain locked. It doesn’t matter if it’s a licensing issue, a deliberate strategy to create scarcity or just oversight, the end result is the same: discontented players. The ensuing question is, how long will Epic let this feeling simmer before they finally pull the trigger and give the people what they want? For the time being, though, it seems that we will have to check the shop every day just in case, Tomorrow might just be the day of Naruto’s return.
