Old Fortnite Skins Are Returning: What’s Actually Exclusive And What Could Come Back?

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One of the most contentious topics in the Fortnite community is the one surrounding its many exclusive cosmetics that may never be available to obtain ever again. As it stands now, folks have been fighting about this for years, with a lot of players arguing that it's only right that new players get a chance at those classic battle pass skins like Drift or Peely. But this is actually a legal question, rather than something we could put to a vote, so these discussions rarely get anywhere near the heart of the matter.

At issue is Fortnite's FOMO-based system of microtransactions. In the first few years of Fortnite, Epic leaned hard on exclusivity as a motivating tool. The idea was that if you saw a player using a skin that you like but can't have, it would encourage you to grind out future battle passes and pick up anything you think is cool from the shop as soon as possible. But once it became clear that Fortnite might be around for decades, Epic realized that it's not so good to have ultra-famous characters like Darth Vader permanently locked behind an old battle pass.

These days, Fortnite almost never releases any new exclusives. Every free or promotional item now comes with a disclaimer that it could pop up in the item shop later, and battle pass items from Chapter 5 Season 4 and on can now hit the shop 18 months after the season ends. The first of these is the Marvel skin Gwenpool, which comes to the item shop on June 28. You can feel confident that any new cosmetic that pops up these days will eventually hit the shop.

It's a very different situation than it used to be. There are tons of items from older passes, as well as lots of other old cosmetics, that remain stuck in exclusivity hell, and many other cosmetics whose status is ambiguous and hard to gauge. Thanks to Epic's hard pivot away from exclusivity the last couple of years, and the natural cycling in and out of players, they've created an environment where it can be hard to figure out what old skins are actually exclusive and which ones aren't, because nobody's really been keeping track as we went. At least not accurately.

But that's what this article is ultimately about--sorting out which Fortnite cosmetics actually are exclusive, and which ones are not. Below, we'll break it all down as best we can--but keep in mind that Epic's lawyers may be the only ones who really have the answers here. But since they aren't going to be sharing that info with us, this piece is the next best thing. Let's dive in.

In This Article

Skins that are permanently exclusive and will not return

Any battle pass skin from Chapter 1 Season 2 through Chapter 5 Season 3

Everything in this era is truly exclusive. This is because Epic promoted the passes as the only way to ever get the included items. The battle pass FAQ used to say this during Chapter 2 Season 7: "Rewards from a Battle Pass can only be earned in that season, and will not be available in later seasons." The back half of that sentence--"will not be available in later seasons"--is not ambiguous at all. So if Epic were to sell items from one of those old passes, that quote would suddenly become false, and that would, in turn, open the company to litigation and fines. Very few old battle pass skins could hypothetically sell well enough to be worth the potential price. There are 222 skins that fall into this category, which represents just 8% of all Fortnite skins.

Examples:

Free Winterfest 2019 skins

Epic's blog post announcing the first Winterfest claimed that the free cosmetics from the Winterfest lodge would be "exclusive to this year’s Winterfest!" This was the only Winterfest where they described the rewards that way.

Items:

Anything in the shop that was marketed as "exclusive."

The Fortnite Championship Series-themed Major Glory and The Champion were each sold in the item shop as a "time-limited exclusive," which is pretty clear. Likewise, The Paradigm skin and its accompanying emote were promoted on Twitter with this claim: "These exclusive items are only available for a limited time." And, in 2024 when The Paradigm mistakenly returned to the shop for two hours, Epic confirmed its status as a permanent exclusive.

Partial exclusives or grey areas

Skins in this category probably can return, but due to the use of certain wording in their promotions, they might remain exclusive to the method through which they were previously available. In some cases, that makes them essentially exclusive, if not literally--since you probably can't play Fortnite on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 these days anyway. But most of the skins here don't face that sort of obstacle, and those could come back any time.

Even so, players often think of the skins in this category as being exclusive. It makes sense--no skin in this category has ever appeared in the item shop or become available again any other way. But, technically, anything here could come back at any time--but the circumstances required to do so may not be worth the effort.

Monthly Crew skins

Epic has consistently stated that the monthly skins you receive for subscribing to Fortnite Crew can come back at any time, though they've also referred to these skins as being Crew exclusives--the Fortnite storefront on the Epic Games Store mentions that one of the perks of a Crew subscription is an "always-new Outfit Bundle that only Fortnite Crew members can get" every month. No Fortnite Crew skin has ever come back after rotating out at the end of its month, but that doesn't mean they can't. But if any of them did come back, you would almost certainly need to be subscribed to Fortnite Crew to get them.

Examples:

PlayStation Plus skins

Like the Crew packs, these packs are stated to be exclusive to PlayStation Plus members. So it's the same story as it is with the Crew skins, essentially--they would likely only be able to return for PS+ subscribers.

Examples:

Early phone collabs

There have been a number of skins over the years that required you to play Fortnite on a specific model of phone or tablet. In more recent years, Epic has tended to include language specifying that these sorts of promotional items can be sold in the item shop after the promotion ends. But some early examples--like Galaxy for 2018 Samsung tablets, Ikonik for 2019 Samsung phones, and Honor Guard for the 2019 Honor 20 phone--were promoted as being exclusive to specific phone models that are now at the end of their lifespans, most of a decade later.

Examples:

Level Up skins

From Chapter 3 Season 1 until Chapter 5 Season 4, Fortnite offered a "Level Up Quest Pack" during the last month of each season that would include a skin and its accompanying accessories. By then collecting the pack's time-gated level-up tokens during rounds of Battle Royale, owners would unlock a very different and unique bonus style. These skins were not referred to as "exclusives," but the cool bonus styles were specifically stated to only be available to unlock through the end of the season. So it's likely Epic could bring back the base styles for these skins, but perhaps without the time-gated bonus styles--and without the bonus styles, those skins are a lot less enticing. It's probably not a coincidence that Epic stopped making these the very same season they ended exclusivity for new battle passes.

Examples:

Twitch Prime packs

The skins included in both Twitch Prime packs were advertised on Twitter as being exclusive.

Items:

Skins that are not exclusive

Any skin not listed in the previous categories is not an exclusive and could return to the item shop at any time.

The vast majority of skins fall into this category--more than 2,000 of them, in fact. Here are the categories of skins that always have a chance of popping up in the item shop, and examples of each type. This includes some skins we previously believed were exclusive.

Most FNCS skins

Epic recently brought back two older FNCS skins, Dummy Supreme and Championship Aura, which were thought to be exclusives because they had a tag that said "Limited Time!" on their shop pages. Until then, no FNCS skin with that tag had ever returned, while the ones released more recently without that tag return every season. We suspect the distinction between these two skins (and several other FNCS skins) is that they were not otherwise promoted as exclusives. We just inferred that these ones would be, because of that tag, and because the first two FNCS skins Epic released, The Champion and Major Glory, actually were exclusive.

Examples:

Console pack-ins

Console bundle skins, like Royale Bomber on PS4 and Wildcat on Switch, have likewise long been considered exclusives, but none of them were ever really advertised as such. With the Royale Bomber skin, for example, Epic told Polygon in 2018 that the PS4 console bundle was "the only way you can get the ‘Royale Bomber’ at this time," which specifically confirmed that it was not exclusive, and the skin was later offered in a controller bundle as well.

However, none of these skins have ever been sold in the item shop, and the codes for these items sell for a lot of money on the secondary market. While Epic doesn't make any money directly from those purchases, the people buying them almost certainly spend a lot of money in Fortnite, too. And it would probably alienate those folks if Epic took a skin they'd spent hundreds of real-world dollars to get and sold it in the shop for 1,200 V-bucks. So this is a bit of an uncertain category.

Examples:

Any battle pass skin from Chapter 5 Season 4 or after

These skins can appear in the shop starting 18 months after the end of their respective seasons.

Regular item shop items

Music pass (aside from Ultraviolet Billie), OG pass, and Lego pass items

They can be sold any time after the pass ends without any waiting period, though Epic has not been in any hurry to get most of these items into the item shop--only three music pass skins and one Lego pass skin have shown up so far.

Real money packs

This includes Starter Packs, Save the World packs, and any other bundle that requires or required genuine human currency to purchase

Winterfest skins (other than 2019)

Refer a Friend/Reboot Rally skins

Any other free skin

That's everything there is to know about the suddenly more confusing world of Fortnite Item Shop exclusivity rules. There's a lot that is left in a gray area, but a lot else that's not so unclear. In fact, it's often quite clear that Epic is giving itself permission to be less restrictive when it comes to selling--and reselling--skins in the game.

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