Today, Epic Games launched a small revolution within the evolution of Fortnite into a metaverse by allowing island creators to implement microtransactions.
More specifically, the tools have existed for a couple of months, but starting today, islands including microtransactions in V-Bucks can be published.
The rules are described in detail in an official post, but there are very specific restrictions regulating what can and cannot be sold in user-created islands.
Here’s what can be sold.
- Durable items (items players can buy once that don’t expire over time, persistent across sessions within an island experience)
- Consumable items (items that deplete when used in-game, may be persistent across sessions)
- Items with gameplay elements, including those that share a visual overlap with approved Fortnite cosmetics categories (e.g. “Boots of Speed”, “Jetpack”)
- Bundles or collections of durable, consumable and gameplay items
- Paid random items (items that provide a chance to receive a random reward)
- New parental control will let parents decide if their child can acquire paid random items in regions where these are available to players.
- Custom passes, progression systems, and paid areas
On the other hand, here’s what cannot be sold to preserve coherence with Fortnite’s overall ecosystem.
- Items that are Outfits, Cars, Trucks, Buses, or Emotes, regardless of the terms used to describe them
- Items that visually overlap with other Fortnite cosmetics categories, but are purely cosmetic and offer no gameplay value.
- Items where the price changes based on what Epic-made cosmetics a player has equipped
- Items using any custom or external checkout process
- Physical products or merchandise (e.g. hats, t-shirts)
- XP, or imply that your offer includes granting of XP
As mentioned above, as usual with Fortnite microtransactions, there may be further restrictions that apply depending on the region and platform one is playing on.
For instance, you cannot have lootboxes (paid random items) in Singapore, Qatar, Australia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, while they’re restricted to players over 18 in the UK and in Brazil (from March 2026).
There are a bunch of rules that creators need to familiarize themselves with, and they’re available in the development documentation. No one ever promised that making money out of microtransactions was easy.
