Fortnite subscription service will give skins and store cash for £10/month

If your nieces and nephews are not yet pestering you with Christmas lists of page and item numbers from the Argos catalogue, here's something else you'll likely have demanded: a Fortnite subscription. Epic Games today announced the Fortnite Crew, a £10/month optional subscription service offering exclusive outfits plus pocket money for the item store. That's launching alongside Chapter 2, Season 5 next Wednesday, the 2nd of December. After Galactus tries to eat the world.

For £10/€12/$12 each month, Fortnite Crew members will get 'Monthly Crew Packs'. These contain an exclusive new outfit with at least one accessory, access to the latest battle pass (which cost about £6, and usually run for three months), and 1000 V-Bucks (£6.50 in real money) to spend on cosmetics in the microtransaction sure. The game's still free-to-play, not charging for access or anything, just perks and prestige.

Epic say that items from the Crew Packs "will never be sold or given away to non-Crew members." Rarity bestows prestige, especially in Fortnite. At times, some players have been right narked by skins that hadn't been available for years coming back on sale. Doing that with Crew items would be a huge problem for some would-be subscribers. What a weird social mess has sprawled around this game.

Epic recently polled some players to gauge interest in subscriptions. The actual plan has turned out cheaper than some they had suggested.

As much as I'm sure this is Epic wanting to steady income of subscriptions rather than relying on purchases, I can see this being useful for some parents. Pay £10/month and that's it, hopefully your kid's settled for Fortnite, and with a set allowance they'll stop begging for V-Bucks. Until the Crew skins lose all perceived value because loads of people have them, so folks feel peer-pressured to buy other ones, but 1000 V-Bucks isn't enough to get anything flashy, so they'll want more, and... look, I'm not great with children.

Season 4 of Chapter 2 will wrap up with the Nexus War finale event live in-game on December 1st at 9pm (4pm EST), when Galactus will arrive. I imagine the big lad's a mite peckish. Probably have to slap his hands away.