Fortnite's Original Mode Is Finally Going Free — Here's Why That's a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

The original Fortnite launched in 2017 as a co-op survival game where players built forts and fought off waves of zombie-like husks. It was fine. Niche. Nobody outside a specific slice of the gaming community paid much attention. Then Epic tacked on a free Battle Royale mode almost as an experiment, and within months the game was everywhere and Save the World got quietly left behind — paid, underserved, something Epic seemed content to maintain in a holding pattern but never really develop.

“Nobody outside a specific slice of the gaming community paid much attention.”

That changes April 16th.

Epic Games has confirmed that Fortnite: Save the World goes free-to-play on April 16, 2026 — nearly a decade after the game launched, and six years after the company originally promised the free transition and then shelved it without much explanation in 2020. When it goes live, it'll be available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch 2, and cloud platforms including GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna, and Xbox Cloud Gaming. The original Nintendo Switch and mobile are excluded.

The platform that stands out most is Switch 2. Epic confirmed Save the World will launch on Nintendo's new hardware on day one, giving it a built-in audience of players who've never had access to the mode before.

Pre-registration is already open. Epic is staggering community milestone rewards at 300,000, 700,000, and 1 million sign-ups, and players who've been around since the paid era will receive thank-you gifts — superchargers, vouchers, and gold — on launch day. Small gestures, but they're there.

The marketing lead-up has been exactly the kind of weird that Fortnite does well. On March 9th, the official Fortnite social accounts dropped a short cryptic video of strips of raw bacon hiding in mundane household locations — tucked behind a lamp, peeking out of a cereal bowl — with the caption "Save it for a rainy day…" Fans decoded it within hours. Bacon is a long-running item in Save the World's loot pool, and the teaser was a way of speaking directly to the people who'd know exactly what it meant.

For longtime STW players, this is vindication after years of feeling like a forgotten footnote. For everyone else, it's a chance to see where Fortnite actually came from.