Since its release in September 2017, the battle royale aspect of Fortnite has become a cultural phenomenon. In that time, hundreds — if not thousands — of cosmetics have been released, earning Epic Games a pretty penny and allowing it to become one of the biggest players in the games industry as a whole.
From pop stars to superheroes, footballers to streamers, collaborations have formed a large part of the offering. Whether skins or appropriated dance moves sold as emotes, often the FOMO (fear of missing out) on a particular drop is high among Fortnite fans.
The new tool, from prominent Fortnite website Fortnite.GG, scanned accounts for the cosmetics you've acquired over the years and assigned a V-Buck value to it.
Superstar French streamer Kinstaar, for example, posted that his account had a value of over one million V-Bucks across 2744 items.
However, due to users needing to sign into the site with their Epic accounts, the publisher moved quickly to shut it down. Some players had complained on social media that their accounts had been compromised or hacked, but this wasn't the case.
After several fake images circulated the net, an explanation appeared online that stated that players had simply been logged out of Fortnite by Epic themselves as a security measure. Logging back in resolved any issues.
After Epic made a statement on social media, prominent leakers HYPEX and Lucas7yoshi took to Twitter to defend the tool, and Fortnite.GG.
The page hosting the tool can still be accessed, but when you try to click 'sign in' a message appears explaining that it has been removed. It is unclear if, at all, the tool will be restored in a different form.