This week, the news came out that Fortnite was going to use Monero as an exclusive cryptocurrency payment option for Fortnite’s merchandise store. Unfortunately, this has been an “accident”, says Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney.
Last Wednesday, we reported that Epic Games’ official Fortnite merchandise store, Retail Row, started accepting Monero (XMR) as a payment option. The news came from the Monero team and was revealed on Reddit and Twitter.
The official Fortnite Merch Store is now exclusively accepting #Monero as a cryptocurrency payment option! https://t.co/NWmHhzE6Kg
— Monero || #xmr (@monero) January 1, 2019
Fornite adding Monero as a payment option was of course very big news for the cryptocurrency. Fortnite took over the gaming world in 2018 with over 40 million people playing the game every month. The game is free to play but you can buy add-ons online for your characters and this customization. Epic Games made 2 billion dollars in revenue via Fortnite in 2018.
Unfortunately for Monero, the good news only lasted 3 days. Yesterday, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that the company worked with a partner to open a merchandise store and that Monero was added as a payment option accidentally.
Actually, Fortnite’s brief foray into crypto was accidental. We worked with a partner to open a merchandise store, and somewhere along the way Monero payment was enabled.https://t.co/vzmSCMey3T
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) January 6, 2019
Sweeney notably called Fortnite’s foray into crypto “brief,” suggesting the addition of Monero as a payment option has already been disabled. Looking at the GloBee payment option, this indeed seems the case, since the Monero Payment option is not available anymore on Sunday.
At the time of writing, XMR is trading at $53,98, up 7.50% over the past 24-hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.