Fortnite has long been that rare game where the microtransactions are actually part of the appeal, and so fans have been pretty baffled lately by the messy state of the game's Item Shop. The selection of skins, emotes and other cosmetics has been pretty poor recently, and also the shop seems quite buggy. Combined with the awful new locker UI introduced in Chapter 5, Fortnite's cosmetic game is really struggling in some surprising ways.

The Shop has particularly been a bit of a nightmare this week. On Monday, the Skull Trooper skin was added to the shop in two separate tabs, and a potentially related issue forced Epic to take down the entire store aside from the packs you buy with real currency through the platform you're playing on. On Tuesday morning after this week's patch, a bunch of the content creator Icon skins were supposed to be available to buy, but that section of the shop was hidden because their announced Lego styles weren't visible. Tuesday night then brought us the latest example of a Festival track hitting the shop a day or more before it was supposed to--something that has happened repeatedly since Fortnite Festival launched in December. Epic dealt with this by rearranging that section of the shop and removing a bunch of jam tracks--and then also by accidentally (and admittedly humorously) plugging in the Valentines-themed Heartbreaker skin where the song Heartbreaker by Pat Benatar was supposed to go.

Epic also didn't release any new Winterfest-themed cosmetics in the item shop until after Winterfest ended, and this week's patch added a Winterfest Wish emote and a 2023-specific New Year's emote to the game files for unknown reasons--even if they'd somehow been forgotten during the previous updates, why add them back in now?