Happy holidays! ‘Fortnite’ now lets you buy your friends gifts

By Gabe Gurwin Updated November 27, 2018

Thanksgiving has come and gone, which means the jingle bells are jingling, the latkes are sizzling, and everyone is frantically searching for gifts to give to their friends and family this holiday season. If your loved ones are fans of Fortnite, however, you can now give them the gift of a silly skin or dance.

Announced by Epic Games on November 27, Fortnite gifting will be available on all platforms except for iOS, due to Apple’s policy restrictions. Once update 6.31 rolls around, you’ll have a one-week trial period to purchase items for your friends from the shop. Alongside the standard “Purchase Items” prompt will be one labeled “Buy As A Gift,” and you can then choose someone on your friends list to receive the new goodies. As it is a gift, you can also add a note alongside it, and we’re guessing some players’ messages will be a little different from what they’d write on an actual gift card.

There are a few stipulations, which Epic listed out in the post. You can’t get your money refunded for a gift, so make sure it’s something your friend is really going to love, unless you’re a jerk. You also have to be friends with someone for at least two days before sending a gift and you can only send three gifts per day. If you prefer, you can also disable receiving gifts in your Fortnite account settings, though we’re not entirely sure why you’d do that.

Update 6.31 includes other additions, as well, including the Team Rumble limited-time mode, which tasks each team with eliminating 100 other players. New Epic and Legendary versions of the Pump Shotgun are also available with the update, for those of you who like to get up close and personal in combat, and crashing and controller input issues have been addressed, as well.

Fortnite: Battle Royale is still free-to-play with cross-play across Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, but we expect parents will be spending plenty of cash on DLC and memorabilia for their kids this holiday season. Perhaps you can buy them a container of floss, too.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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