Epic Games announced this week that Fortnite’s in-game V-bucks currency would be getting more expensive with a somewhat glib statement: “The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills,” the company wrote. The price hike will go into effect on March 19th, the same day the next major Fortnite season debuts, and enough users have complained about the increase that an Epic staffer acknowledged the protests on a post on Reddit.
But when The Verge asked Epic executives at the GDC Festival of Gaming this week if they could be specific about why the company raised the price, they didn’t say much more.
“I think what we put out publicly is pretty accurate,” Andre Balta, Epic’s senior director of ecosystem growth, tells The Verge. “It’s pure operating costs of running a business, and that was the main push. We’re going to continue to, as a business, focus on creating amazing games and gameplay, but the price hike is a direct correlation to the operating costs.” Balta declined to put a percentage or dollar value on how those operating costs have changed.
Right now, $8.99 gets you a pack of 1,000 V-bucks, but after the change, that same price will only get you 800 V-bucks. Other V-bucks packs will offer fewer amounts of V-bucks for their same pack prices, too. Epic last raised the price of V-bucks in 2023.
“We’re just investing in growing the ecosystem a lot,” adds Steve Allison, GM of the Epic Games Store. He says there are a lot of “amazing things that’ll be rolling out in the next, like, 6 to 12 months that, I think, when you look back, you’ll understand what’s been going on.”