Fortnite fans are forking out real money on eBay for rare species of Sprite — the game's cute new, Pokémon-like creatures that can be collected and traded.

Completed eBay listings show people have paid up to $100 for the promise of rare species being shared with them in-game. Hundreds of listings reveal players choosing to spend on the game's most uncommon varieties — including the coveted Zero Point Sprite — and their various rarer special-colored variants.

Sprite collecting arrived in Fortnite last weekend as a key part of the battle royale game's most recent season, which introduced extraction mechanics for the first time. The gameplay loop here sees players discovering creatures, levelling them up in power, then securing them for use in future games at competitive extraction points. (And yes, you can steal them from other players.)

While each Sprite's gameplay effect is relatively minor (healing buffs, brief invisibility, and so forth), the act of collecting each type is compulsive, with a dedicated collection screen that's a little like a Pokédex. The tension of finding and then extracting a rare variant is also palpable, especially as some are hugely difficult to find (such as that one featuring controversial streamer TheBurntPeanut).

However, this difficulty is balanced by the fact that — once extracted — infinite copies of a Sprite can be spawned with enough Sprite Dust, an in-game grind currency, and then shared within matches with other players. It's this effect which has led to players forming Sprite trading groups on platforms such as reddit and Discord — and also to those eBay listings.

To give an idea of how rare some species are, Fortnite's millions-strong community has only managed to extract one single Gummy-colored variant of the rarest Zero Point Sprite since its arrival into the game last Thursday, Epic Games developer TofuChris has revealed. (Reports that an earlier player who obtained the Sprite had been threatened with having their details doxxed now appear incorrect.) That said, future items and events are certain to make rare species easier to find over the course of the season — and fans are certainly enjoying the hunt.

Fortnite's overall player count spiked above 2.5 million players on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend — impressively, slightly higher than last week's new season launch — as the game hosted Sprite collecting events. Each further week will host more of these, as more species are also added — and inevitably turn up on eBay shortly after.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social