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In case you haven’t been paying attention, Fortnite is running a pirate-themed season with One Piece crossover content available right now.
But the big news is the discovery of a Pirate Shop, which makes the entire Item Shop free for two weeks. If you’re running in a squad, then everyone on your team gets the reward.
Just to reiterate: if you discover the Pirate Shop token, then you and your teammates will be able to add every single cosmetic item in the Item Shop to your profile for free. That’s potentially hundreds of dollars of stuff.
There are some restrictions: you can’t gift anything to your friends, and you can’t buy levels in the Battle Pass. Other than that, though – everything is yours.
In the aftermath of the Pirate Shop going viral, Fortnite rocketed to over five million concurrent players across all platforms at its peak. It’s a big win for the game which hasn’t been quite as popular as usual of late.
Some are hypothesising that this may be the game’s attempt to retain players once GTA 6 releases later in November. I imagine it’s something all live service developers are thinking about.
So how do you get access to the Pirate Shop? Well, you need to loot Treasure-Hunt chests (they’ve got a skull and crossbones on them) and hope you get extremely lucky. I imagine Epic knows how many of these it’s giving out.
I’m surprised something like this hasn’t been attempted in Fortnite before, because the game’s skins are incredibly popular, so unlocking the Item Shop for lucky winners was always going to bring people back.
I’ll be surprised if anyone here gets access to the Pirate Shop, but make sure you leave a comment if you do!