Epic Games Store GM says Valve's Team Fortress hats "definitely inspired" Epic's new Fortnite crossovers, like getting a Crimson Desert skin when you buy a game through Epic

Epic Games Store general manager Steve Allison says the new batch of gift-with-purchase Fortnite collabs are inspired by Team Fortress 2.

Epic Games has previously offered goodies in Fortnite with the purchase of games on its store – most notably, in 2023, those who purchased Alan Wake 2 on the Epic Games Store received the man himself in Fortnite. However, Epic's gifting efforts seem to be ramping up in 2026, and players can already anticipate a Resident Evil: Requiem collaboration (giving players a Grace Ashcroft skin) and a Crimson Desert collaboration (giving players a Kliff skin).

Posting about the Kliff skin on Twitter, Allison says, "This is among the first of many Fortnite crossovers led by the Epic Games Store team granted as a with gift with purchase," a campaign that "will scale to over 100 partnerships per year." He explains, "This program was conceived to help developers sell more games."

However, in a reply, one user noted the similarity between this series of Fortnite collabs and what Valve used to do with Team Fortress 2. Steam used to offer incentives for purchasing games like Alien Isolation, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, and Sleeping Dogs – while others titles like Telltale's Poker Night at the Inventory duology gifted items upon completing tasks in the game.

Allison admitted that this was "definitely inspired by exactly that," thanks to his own experience on the other side of the Team Fortress 2 deal. He explains, "when I was at Telltale Games we did TF hats as a gift with purchase every chance we could as it would always put our games in the top 5 sellers for a good 1-2 weeks," and this experience seems to have motivated Epic to try out a similar experiment with Fortnite. He says, "We tested this a lot late in 2025 and the lifts to partners sales were impressive and just like what we experienced then back in the day."

Epic's gifting efforts should hopefully be a win-win, theoretically boosting sales of partners' games so Fortnite players can get some new loot. And, for Epic, it may inspire some players to pick up a major third-party release like Resident Evil Requiem on the somewhat stigmatized Epic Games Store.

The Fortnite x South Park collab has me yearning for a canceled GTA-inspired game from 2005