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For the past few, many players have been experiencing grievances with the current state of the item shop in Epic Games’s massive Battle Royale game: Fortnite. In recent weeks the issues have gotten to the point where many question if the shop is being run by a human at all.
The current issues with the item shop range greatly from years-old emotes, such as the “Breaker” emote, being marked as new to the wrong items being shown in the shop in general.
One particular error that seems to happen often nowadays is when an item that is supposed to be in the item shop is instead replaced with an item of a similar name. The most recent example of this happened on April 27, 2024, when the Blaze Glider was not in the shop, instead replaced with a skin named Blaze. Making it impossible to obtain the glider without purchasing the Biker Brigade bundle.
This type of error can apply to any type of item in the shop, such as when the Heartbreak Jam Track for Fortnite Festival was instead replaced with a skin by the name of Heartbreaker. This error was particularly embarrassing as skins aren’t even supposed to appear in the Jam Track segment of the item shop.
Then there is the issue of skins appearing multiple times in the same item shop. This has happened many times so far in 2024, but one of the most notable examples was when the Wukong skin was seen twice in a row. Added to the shop both as a normal skin and a Year of the Dragon skin.
The recent item shop skin issues have naturally led to many seasonal skins being added to the shop at the wrong time. Such as Halloween-themed skins appearing in December and January. The most notable example of this occurred on April 26, 2024, when the year 4th of July “Star-Spangles Ranger” skin was put into the shop early. This example is notable as it was a rare time when Epic Games seemingly acknowledged the issue and pulled the item from the shop early!
With all of these shop issues being near constant for the entirety of Chapter 5, many fans of the game have begun to speculate on social media that higher-ups at Epic Games have begun to delegate control of the shop lineup to an AI program to reduce costs. Leading to seemingly unnatural mistakes such as this which most humans would be able to catch.
While it is currently unconfirmed if Epic has delegated the shop to AI, it is hard to come up with alternate explanations for how mistakes such as skins showing up in the Jam Track section of the shop can possibly happen.
Fortnite is currently available to download on Android, IOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S|X, and PC via the Epic Games Store.
