Epic Games has announced a price hike for Fortnite in-game currency V-bucks that will help them “pay the bills”.
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In a blog post, Epic Games explained that “the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot” so the company is “raising prices to help pay the bills.”
As it stands, you can buy 1000 V-bucks for £6.99, which can be used to buy cosmetics, items, emotes and access to the battle pass in the free-to-play online multiplayer game. However from March 19, players will only get 800 V-bucks for £6.99.
Following the update, the cost of the battle pass will drop to 800 V-bucks but the 500 bonus V-bucks for completing it has been scrapped. The price of the music and Lego passes have also been reduced. However gamers aren’t impressed with the changes.
BREAKING NEWS: billion dollar company needs to completely screw over the playerbase “to help pay the bills” https://t.co/YHh4qyBTlb
— jamie ▴ (@linkkling) March 10, 2026
“It’s enshittification in practice. Start with something good, get people hooked, then overtime make it worse and worse and worse,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “Epic is the only company capable of never ruining the core gameplay of a game, but making everything around it hell to the point you never want to play the game again,” added another.
“There’s just something dystopian and disgusting about them saying ‘costs of running the game has gone up and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills’ by a multi-billion company that makes insane profits. If you want to nickel and dime your playerbase, at least don’t play victim,” said a third.
Changing the battepass in Fortnite to be 800 v-bucks and only get 800 upon completion is the most disappointing change I’ve seen since playing the game since 2018.
I can’t believe their timing on announcing the news either.. The season has been dragged on and players are…
— Loeya (@Loeya) March 11, 2026
Last month Epic Games announced that PC players had spent more than $1.1billion on its Epic Games Store in 2025 and industry experts believe the company earned more than $6.1billion in gross revenue last year. However, general manager Steve Allison recently told Polygon that Epic Games Store was only “marginally profitable” with the company needing to pay developers of third-party games and those given away as part of its free game program.
Recently, a number of big stars have followed in Chappell Roan’s footsteps and asked Epic Games for their own in-game Fortnite skin. Both Winter Olympics champion Alysa Liu and Madison Beer have publicly demanded they be added to the game.
In other news, Wordle creator Josh Wardle has unveiled his new puzzle game Parseword, which looks to make cryptic crosswords “more accessible”.
The post ‘Fortnite’ just got more expensive and players are furious appeared first on NME.
