Fortnite is a popular online game that was released in 2017 and developed by Epic Games. It has garnered significant interest from gamers because of its high quality interface and overall appeal. Now, the merchandise store for the game has made Monero its exclusive cryptocurrency payment. The announcement was made on January 1, 2019.
The Monero payments in the Fortnite Merch Store will be processed by a digital coin processing service, GloBee, which lets different retailers around the world to accept cryptocurrency payments in the form of dogecoin, litecoin, ethereum, bitcoin and other.
While the news that one of the world’s most popular has chosen a cryptocurrency as an exclusive payment option is very exciting, the more important question is why Fortnite has chosen Monero.
According to BTC Manager, users were surprised since Monero is not even in the top 10 digital coins by market capitalization and other “rivals” are often chosen as payment options by retailers, especially Ripple. In addition, Monero is one of the most targeted cryptocurrencies by crypto jackers. Fortnite was also a target by some cyber criminals who targeted Fornite’s users to steal certain amounts of bitcoin.
Nevertheless, Monero’s lead maintainer, Mr. Riccardo Spagni, explained that Monero was chosen over Bitcoin due to privacy concerns related to the “people’s currency”. However, this is a huge success for Monero and the team behind it, since Fornite is one of the most famous video games anywhere and its user base is growing steadily.