For the first time since it began running its annual small-scale Rainbow Royale event to celebrate members of the LGBTQIA+ community four years ago, Fortnite skipped its Pride celebration in 2025.
For each year since 2021, Fortnite has held its annual Pride event, Rainbow Royale, sometime during the summer. It was never a particularly huge event, as it mainly consisted of a pile of free rainbow-colored items in the item shop, like the Take a Bow and The Dip emotes. In 2022, they even had a Pride-themed battle bus and a few quests that you could complete to unlock a cool weapon wrap and hammer pickaxe, and dropped a skin for DCs Dreamer, a transgender superhero, in the item shop as part of the celebration, but that was as involved as it ever got. The annual Pride event wasnt exactly a takeover, since it never involved gameplay changes in Battle Royale. Last year the whole thing was only a shop section, which popped up for a week in both June and September.
Fortnite used to celebrate Pride.In 2025, though, Fortnite has skipped Rainbow Royale completely. For the first time since Epic introduced the event, Fortnite has made it to October without anything related to Rainbow Royale appearing in the game. None of the free Pride items have been available in the shop during this calendar year thus far. The Mazy skin, a paid cosmetic that is usually included in the Rainbow Royale shop section, has popped up in the item shop by itself on just one single day in 2025.
GameSpot contacted Epic prior to the publication of this article for a statement. Epic has since responded, with a spokesperson saying, "We missed the Rainbow Royale window while we focused on shipping other activations and modes."
Its unclear if, beyond what Epic said, the decision to skip Pride is the result of the new Trump administrations bigoted attempts to eliminate diversity and inclusion efforts in the United States. We have no idea whether Epic skipped its Pride events because leadership agrees with the administrations queerphobic policies, if it just wants to avoid any "controversy" that might fire up the right, or if theres some other reason entirely.
But weve spent this whole year thus far watching one corporation after another become more regressive in order to stay on the good side of an unhinged presidential administration, including in gaming. There was a huge dust-up earlier this year when the long-running MMO RuneScape didnt release new Pride event content, despite staff reportedly having finished some of the work already. Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy said that Pride is "now controversial in a way it didnt used to be and that controversy now brings more risk than it did previously, risk that Im personally responsible to protect against."
"Games and studios are being cancelled because of content that is perceived to be woke or representative. The pendulum is swinging back in a way we didnt expect," Bellamy went on. These comments didnt do much to assuage the games LGBTQIA+ community.
Since Epic hasnt made any public comment about Rainbow Royales status, its pretty tough to look at its disappearance and not assume the Fortnite maker is hedging its bets in the exact same way that Jagex did with RuneScape.
This story was updated on October 3 with a statement from Epic Games.