I’ll be honest, I’ve largely fallen off paying attention to Fortnite since it stopped being my official job, and especially as anything good about the game gets drowned out by the volume of Tim Sweeney’s bullshit. But the drama swirling around the game’s recent addition of a rare One Piece item has sucked me back in, given how much it exemplifies what’s both good and bad–full disclosure, mostly bad–about Fortnite.
On November 1 Fortnite introduced its “Treasure Hunters” event, which includes One Piece skins, new points of interest and a smaller island map, and, most notably, a super-rare item called a Pirate Token. Pirate Tokens can be found randomly in chests, and they grant the team that finds them basically unfettered access to the game’s item shop. The token can be activated twice, once in 2026 and once in 2027, and for 14 days players can claim more or less anything sold in the shop. (There’s some caveats: no gifting or transferring the token, and no real money offers or battle pass levels.)
Obviously, if you care about Fortnite items, this is a great deal. Players have gone nuts for it: According to player count tracker Fortnite GG, the game saw an 80% player jump the day the event went live, and while numbers have risen and fallen since then, they’re still much higher than the number of players the game had previously. Some players have been selling tools they claim will help players find the token or offering to squad up in exchange for money, and IGN reports that there were accounts that had found tokens for sale on eBay for $9-$10k. (IGN reports those listings have since been taken down, and Epic took to Twitter to remind players that “Buying an account or using fake tools is a scam.”)
“This is just like any of the chests in Battle Royale, so every player has an equal opportunity to find Pirate Shop Access,” Epic wrote in its tweet. But this hasn’t stopped Fortnite players from trying to ascribe meaning and strategy where none can be unearthed. The rule going around is that there’s a 1 in 700,000 chance of finding a token, but Epic hasn’t disclosed the odds. Forbes debunked a player theory that lower-level accounts had a better likelihood of finding tokens. Prominent leaker Hypex has claimed Fortnite is going to introduce a “power hour” that will increase the token’s spawn rate, but there’s no confirmation of that. Players on social media have been explaining a compass that can allegedly lead you to a token, but it’s not real. Despite the wealth of SEO-bait guides out there for finding a token, there doesn’t seem to be any real strategy beyond playing in a squad to increase the number of people who could find tokens, and then just opening every chest you can.
There’s part of this that I love: One of my favorite things about Fortnite from my time obsessively living inside it was the way players collectively created storylines, theories, and strategies, and how those came to define the game well beyond whatever Epic put into it. The old days of Fortnite felt to me like a place I was part of creating, and I loved the weird characters, shorthand, and rituals players devised to make the game their own. I see some of that in the way players are trying to game the token, mining for meaning in Epic’s latest addition and creating group truths about it through sheer force of will.
But on the other hand, this thing sucks. The random odds and incentive to keep playing in hopes of finding a token feel like the worst aspect of loot boxes, except loot boxes frequently require odds disclosures. Fortnite arguably kicked off the move away from these kinds of predatory mechanics with its battle pass, a reward system taken up across games. The token, notably, is not a loot box, so Epic isn’t required to make the odds public, but its appeal is still based in the same fundamentally gambling instinct that made loot boxes so damaging.
The scams that have risen up around it are par for the course for Fortnite at this point. But the value of the token’s reward–it’s not one skin, it’s all the skins–could make more players, especially young ones, extra prone to falling for them.
And some Fortnite players have speculated the whole thing is just a stunt to hang on to players against the allure of GTA VI; while there wouldn’t be anything wrong with this if it were true, it feels like a version of business brain everyday players of a video game have no reason to be engaging in. Epic can’t be blamed for the universal obsession with GTA VI’s imminent arrival and the hopes of an entire industry that have been pinned on it, but this kind of talk still just bums me out.
In March Epic increased the price of V-bucks, and shortly thereafter had layoffs, citing a “downturn in Fortnite engagement” as one of its justifications. Whatever Fortnite originally was has become lost in a morass of crossover events and AI-laden deals to leverage IP, in Tim Sweeney’s obsession with chasing the latest tech fad whether that’s the metaverse or AI. And in the midst of the Treasure Hunters event Fortnite announced changes to its Crew offering, removing the once-exclusive skins that were part of the membership’s appeal and value.
Again, all of this downturn can’t be put solely on Epic; any game will ultimately fall from its heyday as its novelty erodes and player expectations change. But the Pirate Token just feels extra gross to me, a numbers-boosting grab that’s bringing out the worst in players and doesn’t even have the fun of creating original lore to go with it. Treasure Hunters is set to end with what Epic calls “an unforgettable Chapter 7 end event” on December 5; we’ll see if players stick around until then, or if they burn themselves out on scams and odds first.
