PSA: Epic will honor V-Bucks trapped on Apple platforms

With everything else going on, you may have momentarily forgotten Epic Games and Apple’s on-going legal battle over the Fortnite creator’s alternative payment system that got it booted off the App Store. The lawsuits are still playing out, but here’s a small positive: Epic announced last Friday that your V-Bucks stranded on the macOS and iOS versions of Fortnite will be honored and credited to your account so you can spend them on other platforms.

Epic says that players who purchased V-Bucks on iOS and macOS should receive their credit by today, November 9th. Those V-Bucks can be spent on any platform that can play Fortnite other than iOS or macOS.

In case you’re wondering how far the legal battle has come, we’ve got a whole StoryStream and a brief timeline that can catch you up, but an even shorter version is this: Apple was ultimately forced to allow Epic to continue to update the Unreal Engine for developer use, but Fortnite remains off the App Store.

From a gaming perspective, Epic’s battle with Apple has left the iOS and macOS versions of Fortnite a shadow of their former selves. Play outside of Apple’s ecosystem is disabled and the core progression loop that keeps players coming back to the game — the seasonal updates and battle pass system — are inaccessible. Fortnite on Apple platforms never saw this summer’s “Nexus War” Marvel update, nor the series of in-game concerts that followed, and there’s no telling when any of that content might come back. If players want to spend their V-Bucks and stay up-to-date with the game, they’ll have to do so somewhere else.