Players paying up to $ 450 for Fortnite disk copies

Fortnite It owes a lot of its massive success staggered to the fact that anyone can download and play the royal battle mode of the game for free. But this free-to-play popularity has not prevented people from paying heavily inflated prices of up to $ 450 for retail disk copies of the game.

Gearbox Software has released a limited number of physical disk copies of Fortnite for PS4 and Xbox One (and the PC in Europe) alongside the paid version of Early Access last July. This $ 60 release, which focused on the player's "Save the World" mode versus the environment, came long before the game began to draw attention to the launch of the battle-to-play mode at the same time. end of September.

Retail discs, which have been out of stock at major retailers for months, are quickly becoming collectible items for enraged consumers. Fortnite Fans. A quick search of recently completed eBay listings shows retail console copies of Fortnite (including new, used and sealed copies) sold for an average of about $ 130 (and a median of $ 110) over the last two weeks. The copies used by third-party sellers of Amazon are currently going for a minimum of $ 175 for a bare disc without the case.

If you do not want to pay these inflated resale prices, you can download exactly the same content (including some "exclusive" DLCs) as a "standard founder pack" for $ 40. And Epic says that the "Save the World" mode included on the disc will be available for free by the end of the year, reducing the practical value of paying so much for a used disc.

These practical concerns do not seem to be of much importance for Fortnite super-fans who pay hundreds of dollars just to own a relatively rare "official" physical totem that represents their favorite free-to-play game. These players are probably the same ones who offer hundreds of dollars for the E3 Fortnite swag that was given to participants for free. And before you have to answer the question that these collectors are ridiculous, remember that hundreds of people paid on average thousands of dollars each for Atari cartridges that were literally off-putting in 2015.

Gearbox has not yet responded to a request for comment on whether a physical re-issue is in the cards for Fortnite (or how many physical copies have been sold so far). A representative of Epic Games said that the company had "no plans to announce at this time" regarding its own physical version for Fortnite, before or after the end of the early access period.