Fortnite gifting is available now, but won’t be running through until Christmas, for some reason.
Fortnite Battle Royale is in an odd space. It’s the thing every kid wants for Christmas, but as a free-to-play game, it’s actually quite a hard thing for parents and grandparents to buy.
Very frustrated lady next to me at Gamestop: "My son Kevin wants Fork Knife for his birthday but no place has it in stock."
me: I think it's Fortnite.
Her: No. It's definitely Fork Knife.
Sorry Kevin. I tried.
— Jenny Lawson (@TheBloggess) May 1, 2018
There are retail bundles of Fork Knife Fortnite available in stores, but these amount to little more than a pack of themed cosmetics and some V-Bucks.
If you’ve never tried explaining to a grandparent that you want virtual currency – that is bought with real money, but you can’t spend in the real world – to purchase pickaxes, rucksack pets and “back bling”, then you won’t understand the challenge facing kids today. And if you tell them you want to buy cosmetics, you’ll probably just get a gift voucher for Walgreens or Boots the Chemist.
But if you want to give gifts within the game itself, then Fortnite gifting is enabled now – for a very limited time.
Version 6.31 brings Fortnite gifting with it – along with a legendary pump shotgun, other shotgun buffs, and the usual raft of fixes and tweaks – but gifting will only be active for seven days.
There are also some conditions to Fortnite gifting that you should be aware of:
- Make sure you have Multi-factor authentication enabled on your account. If you’re not sure how to get this setup then check out the instructions here.
- You must have been friends with somebody for at least 48 hours before you can send a gift to them.
- You will only be able to gift three times within a 24 hour period.
- Any gifts that are purchased are non-refundable.
- You can only gift an item that is currently available in the Item Shop.
- Don’t want to receive any gifts? You can disable receiving gifts under Account Settings in game.
We can only assume that Epic is treating this initial Fortnite gifting window as a test-run, and that a wider gifting implementation will follow in due course.
