Fortnite’s online retail store, Retail Row, has officially removed Monero (XMR), the open-source cryptocurrency, as a payment option. What’s more, Fortnite’s CEO claims that its inclusion in the first place was ‘accidental’.
Retail Row was launched last month and offers a plethora of Fortnite-related merchandise, including T-shirts. It was accepting Monero as a payment option through GloBee, which is a global cryptocurrency provider, as of a week ago.
As it happens, this inclusion was not announced officially and the folks over at Moreno discovered this development as a pleasant surprise. The Monero team believed that this was indicative of the edge that they had over other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.
In fact, Monero creator Riccardo Spagni was certain that Fortnite’s decision had to do with the lack of privacy offered by Bitcoin. Of course, it is not clear why the teenager-dominated user base would want privacy in transactions involving the purchase of merchandise containing Fortnite memes.
The Monero hype didn’t last long, as it turned out that Epic Games, the company responsible for developing Fortnite, has no intention of including a cryptocurrency payment option just yet. This past Saturday, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney affirmed this sentiment by tweeting:
“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.”
The ‘brief foray’ confirms that Fortnite has indeed removed Moreno, and is going to stick with traditional payment options like Paypal and Google Pay for now. However, it is worth noting Fortnite isn’t ruling cryptocurrency out entirely. Sweeney added:
“Many of us at Epic are big fans of the decentralized computing tech underlying cryptocurrency, however, a lot more work is needed on volatility and fraud-proofing before bringing it to such a broad audience that includes younger gamers.”
