Fortnite Refer-A-Friend Program: How to participate, free skin rewards, and more

In Chapter 2 Season 5, Fortnite introduced the Reboot-A-Friend program. This program was designed to have players invite friends who had been inactive for a while to play again. Once they had played 20 matches, the inviters would receive a few free cosmetic rewards. Now, Fortnite is introducing the Refer-A-Friend program for Chapter 2 Season 8.

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Fortnite introduces Refer-A-Friend

With the original version of this program, players simply had to invite inactive friends. Now, Fortnite is tasking players to invite friends who have never played Fortnite and don't even have an Epic Games account. That may prove to be difficult.

The majority of gamers have played Fortnite at some point or another, which makes them ineligible to be invited here. What may result is potentially thousands of fake accounts just to invite them and reap the rewards.

The Reboot-A-Friend program incentivized players to invite inactive friends to play again. Image via Epic Games

It seems that Fortnite will be repurposing the "Rift Tour" tab in-game and using it to show progress on the rewards that players can earn. The free rewards include an emblem, a spray, a loading screen and potentially an outfit.

All the rewards are centered around the Rainbow Racer skin, so it makes sense that that would be a potential free skin. The skin hasn't been released yet, so it's certainly possible.

All this is mostly speculation, though. There may not even be a free skin, though the Refer-A-Friend program is poised to be activated. It remains unclear whether or not Epic Games will alter this, since finding friends who haven't played or made an Epic Games account will surely be difficult and may result in mass bot accounts, which Fortnite would likely prefer to avoid.

However, this represents a great opportunity to get a free skin, something Fortnite players haven't been given in quite some time. The other cosmetics are fine, but no one is going to search through their friends list for people who haven't played before for anything but the skin, if that ends up happening.