Fortnite Players Are Furious With Epic Over Sidekick Pets

A huge part of the draw of social online games like Fortnite is purchasing and showing off fun in-game cosmetic items, like character skins, accessories, animated emotes, and more. It’s a way for players to express themselves while spending time in the vast game world. However, it seems that Epic might’ve misread the room with its latest additions, called "Sidekicks."

Sidekicks are pets that tag along as a player is running around the game, and as with just about everything else in Fortnite, they can be customized to the hilt. Players can choose the color of their pet’s fur and eyes, customize fur patterns, adjust its size, and can even put on a stylish outfit and select some emotes for the critters.

It sounds like a nice enough addition, and it's not the feature itself that's making folks mad, but instead, it's the way Epic has supposedly implemented it that is drawing players’ ire. The first sticking point is that pets are personalized before purchase, meaning that once a player chooses their customizations, they are locked into those choices. If they want to change any aspect of their pet, they will have to cough up more money to buy another pet.


That leads to the next point of contention, which is how much it’s going to cost to acquire one of these Sidekicks. Leaks suggest that the pricing for upcoming pets will fall between 1,000 and 1,500 V-Bucks. For context, 1,000 V-bucks costs $8.99, or in other words, 1 V-buck is approximately $0.90. That's the smallest purchase amount, and of course, it's likely that someone will have to buy 2 of those thousand-V-Bucks coupons to be able to snag a Sidekick, meaning that players (or their parents) are looking at about $18 a pop for the hotly-desired pets.

Players have taken to the Fortnite subreddit to express their displeasure, where one user posted a thread imploring their fellow fans to not buy a Sidekick. “I know they're cute. I know they're fun. I know we have all been looking forward to them. But the greed on display is disgusting and should not be rewarded,” wrote /u/mabdog420 in a post with over 4,000 upvotes as of the time of this writing, and many players in the thread echo their sentiments. Of course, even 4,000 users is a drop in the bucket compared to Fortnite's global player base of over 2 million active daily players.

Ultimately, players will have to vote with their wallets, which might lead to Epic changing how Sidekicks work in the future.