Starting on March 18, 2026, Fortnite and Rocket League players woke up to a big surprise. As they logged on to their favorite video games, they checked the daily item shop. It is refreshed daily with cool collectibles, so checking it first became routine for many players. The users saw an item they really liked and wanted to buy it. However, they did not have enough in-game currency. Prepared, they already knew they had $10 on their account. That $10, they thought, would be enough to buy the item. So they went to the currency screen, prepared with the money, and saw this: 1000 Vbucks/Credits: $12.99.
Sources
Fortnite/Rocket League item shop
Epic Games Store News | The Latest Blog Articles About
Key Takeaways
- Epic Games adds inflation to in-game currency, ranging from $2-$10
- Unreal Engine is getting more expensive
In-Depth
Epic Games is a game manufacturer, one of the most popular ones. They manufactured Fortnite, which is a multi-billion-dollar game franchise. They also bought Psyonix, the original company behind Rocket League. That also has an estimated value of over 1 billion dollars. It makes you think, why would Epic Games add inflation to the games that have been making them billions of dollars? The answer is not in the game itself; instead, it’s the server that the games run on.
Epic Games has been using servers from Unreal Engine for years now; it’s the only server Fortnite has ever run on. However, Unreal Engine is getting more expensive. It costs a lot of money to run Fortnite on Unreal Engine servers. On average, Fortnite is being run on over 100,000 servers, and, when having a peak in concurrent players, there are sometimes 1 million servers being used. Unreal Engine is known for having extremely high-quality servers, so it’s no surprise that they would charge money for them. However, these costs seem to be getting out of control for Epic Games.
Now, Epic Games is adding inflation to Fortnite and Rocket League. The inflation in Fortnite is higher than in Rocket League, but it’s still inflation, nonetheless.
As you can see from the picture, the price for 2800 V-Bucks went up by $3. Nobody wants to pay an extra three bucks for a video game. To put it in context: The most amount of money a reasonable person would want to pay for a video game is around twenty dollars. And that’s still expensive, knowing that this video game would benefit you nothing in real life. So a $3 increase? That’s enough to make a reasonable person not buy any amount of in-game currency, no matter how cheap.
The point is, Epic Games has been making some surprising moves lately. This was expected, just not as quickly or as early as people wanted it to happen. As the prices for Unreal Engine go up, the prices for Epic Games’ in-game currency go up. And as that happens, people will buy less and less. So tell me, are you going to still buy currency or not?
Photo Credits
https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1fq75lt/vbucks_inflation/
https://www.thegamer.com/fortnite-v-bucks-prices-rising-uk-canada-mexico