Epic Games backtracks on Fortnite Cosmetic Gating after community backlash

After the recent Island Age Rating initiative sparked controversy within the Fortnite community, Epic Games announced that it would roll back the feature until the company has a sufficient “long-term solution.”

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

The cosmetic control measure was accompanied by the aforementioned Island Age Rating, which assigned ESRB ratings to every user-generated experience in Fortnite Creative. If a map was rated E or E10+, some costumes would be disabled and replaced with a generic costume.

The blog post announcing the update stated that “only 7%” of skins were affected by the update and that most of them would eventually be enabled for all ages. Despite this, the Fortnite community has criticized the rollout of this new initiative, with a common complaint regarding the restriction of paid costumes due to the update.

The v28.00 update bringing these changes will also mark the start of Fortnite Chapter 5, which will kick off 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.