Epic Games Backtracks On Fortnite Cosmetic Gating After Community Backlash

After the recent Island Age Rating initiative caused controversy within the Fortnite community, Epic Games has announced it will be dialing back the feature until the company has a sufficient "long-term solution."

Epic made the announcement on Fortnite's official website, where it confirmed that cosmetic gating will be disabled for the majority of Fortnite's cosmetics beginning with the v28.00 update on December 3. A few items will still be affected, but according to the news post, it will only be a "small number of existing cosmetics and less than 10 outfits" that were chosen "because of their obvious fear or violence elements."

The cosmetic gating measure came packaged with the aforementioned Island Age Rating, which assigned ESRB ratings to each individual user-generated experience in Fortnite Creative. If a map was rated E or E10+, certain costumes would be disabled and replaced with a generic costume.

The blog post announcing the update said that "only 7%" of skins were affected by the update, and that most of them would eventually be enabled for all age ratings. Despite this, the Fortnite community criticized the rollout of this new initiative, with a common complaint centering around paid costumes being restricted due to the update.

The v28.00 update making these changes will also mark the start of Fortnite Chapter 5, which will begin with a new live event called The Big Bang on December 2. Rumors suggest the live event will include rapper Eminem and a collaboration with Lego, who responded to the post announcing the event with a Lego version of the Fortnite llama.

Fortnite is available now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile devices.