A “Big Bang” is coming to Fortnite.
Epic Games has revealed a major live event called “The Big Bang” that will take place on Saturday, December 2 at 2pm ET. Called “a new beginning for Fortnite,” the in-game experience will mark the free-to-play shooter’s apparent transition to a significant new chapter.
Fortnite is currently hosting a shortened “OG” throwback season that brings back the game’s original island locale and familiar weapons and items from earlier incarnations.
Players can jump into the event 30 minutes in advance in parties of up to four players. And Epic Games said that cloud streaming services can be used to play for those who can’t run Fortnite natively on their respective devices.
Six years after the battle royale game’s launch, Fortnite remains immensely popular, with an estimated 241 million players over the last 30 days per third-party data from ActivePlayer. In fact, Epic Games said earlier this month that the OG season launch yielded the largest day in the game’s history, with nearly 45 million players on November 4.
Still, Epic Games hasn’t been immune to economic shifts in the industry. Like many game developers, the company had layoffs this year, cutting 830 people in September while also divesting itself of two subsidiaries. The company also raised the price of its in-game V-Bucks currency around the same time.
Not even Fortnite has been able to escape inflation.
“These adjustments are based on economic factors such as inflation and currency fluctuations,” Epic noted in a blog post at the time, stating that it also recently boosted prices across the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico.
How severe are the price bumps? It depends on how many V-Bucks you’re buying. In the United States, a basic bundle of 800 V-Bucks will rise from the current price of $7.99 to $8.99 in a month, while the heftiest pack of 13,500 V-Bucks will jump from the current $79.99 to $89.99
Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Stacy Elliott.
Source: Decrypt
