It's actually less "real" than Bitcoin. I haven't read the Fortnite TOS, but game companies always grant themselves unilateral permission to create/destroy in-game items/etc whenever they please.

AFAIK know, there's no trading in Fortnite. Games like Hearthstone or League of Legends where there is no way to exchange your goods for anything outside the game (except maybe selling the account as a whole) are indeed nowhere as real as bitcoin. On the otherhand, if it was a Valve game where you can trade items or sell them on the market place, then yes, those have a real value. Although dumping $78m of items in such a market place would probably collapse the item economy?

You can buy a car with bitcoin, but you cannot buy a car with fortnite bucks, that's generally the metric I use to tell how real a currency is and how usable it is.

Bitcoin supply is fixed. In-game currency gets created with a database query.

And they're not giving everybody billions. They're forgoing some fraction of $.07B that represents the revenue they would have otherwise captured. My guess is the fraction of people who spend less on these games because they got a little free in-game currency is near-zero and they might actually see a bump in revenue because they can now send out a marketing blast telling inactive users they have a reason to come back.

Ingame currency cannot be sold or transferred and is 100% lost if the publisher decides to ban you.

In other words, it's not really comparable to any cryptocurrency. Heck, even Steam's stickers/pictures you can unlock by playing games are more of a currency as you can sell (and buy) them for real money.

It’s far less real than Bitcoin if you can’t trade it on an open market.

This is like paying a settlement to employees in a company script instead of legal tender.

> To see this isn't true let's imagine they give away billion points to each player at once. How will their profits from that game change? I expect a big drop.

I wonder about that. The motive in the in-game economy is to have, and spend, more than other players, right? Handing out in-game money to all participants might disrupt things in that everyone can now buy the fancy in-game items, but the competitive/relative component presumably remains. If you want even more in-game items than other players, the dynamic is still there: you still need to pay up.

I mean, they could just devalue the in-game currency. Purchasing said currency would be cheaper, and in game items would be more expensive. It'd be a short-term disruption, but ultimately it wouldn't cost the company much directly, other than temporarily dissatisfied users.

You could even mitigate the former by compensating players by providing them more currency in proportion to the pre-devaluation purchasing power of their virtual wallet.

> they could just devalue the in-game currency

Item prices are fixed by the developer, aren't they? edit I suppose that just kicks the stone down the road. There would still be devaluation in the sense that scarce and expensive items become commonplace.

The item prices could always be "re-fixed" by the developer. There's no reason they must to remain static, especially if there was some "give billions of the currency to everybody" that was somehow unable to be rolled back.

Yes and no...their currency is in their playground. They can manipulate it however they want (though I wonder if that's even legal/would bring on another class action). They can't manipulate the dollar to reduce the impact, though.