Fortnite's release plan and payment model seems super vague

With Fortnite's recent Early Access release, the game has been getting a lot of coverage on sites like Twitch. Now that it is actually in the wild, the game looks really cool. When I started looking into playing it for myself, I saw on their website payment options for packages starting at $39.99, defaulting at $59.99 and increasing up to $149.99. I thought this was strange, as I seem to remember the game being free-to-play at some point. However, after scrolling through the whole front page and the whole "buy-now" section, I figured I simply remembered incorrectly.

Later, I stumbled upon this gamespot article (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fortnite-will-be-free-next-year-but-its-selling-a-/1100-6452033/) stating that it IS going to be free to play, but that it is doing remarkably well in this early access stage. I was really surprised by this news, seeing as there is seemingly no evidence of this future payment model at all on the actual game's site, except for a single-line answer halfway down the Q&A page. After looking more into it, it is also VERY difficult to find anywhere on the site where it is mentioned that this is not Fortnite's full release. In fact, the only place where I can find Early Access mentioned is on a banner at the very bottom of each page and in the Q&A section.

I don't want to sound too accusatory or anything, but this really rubs me the wrong way. While it is POSSIBLE to find that the game does not require a purchase and is not fully released on the website, it is not nearly as easy as it could be. Am I missing something here? I would hate to think that Epic Games is trying to mislead people here, but it really seems like they aren't being as upfront about the nature of the game's release as they should be.

As far as I can tell, they're wanting you to pay cash money to beta test their free to play game. Maybe they're running low on funds and had to do it this way to keep development going or maybe they're being scummy by cashing in on people wanting to play the thing sooner. I dunno.

So is the tutorial.

It's not an uncommon launch method for PC games these days. Dungeon Defenders II and Dauntless are two others I can think of off the top of my head that have done the same within the last year.

They had a buy in model for Paragon despite it being free to play later on in it's life. The idea was to get dedicated, or "more serious", people to play the game and provide feedback. I thought Fortnite was going to be somewhat different though, or that they were considering just actually making it a smaller buying value like Overwatch.

A game that has been in public(albeit closed) beta for like 2 or 3 years already now.

I understand that they're probably just looking for ways to keep the cash flowing in as they finish up development, but the thing that bothers me is how poorly that is communicated. Like I can't believe I was sort of close to buying this game before I ever realized it was actually not finished AND was going to be free to play

Well from a business perspective it makes sense.
Why be upfront about your, possibly, upcoming F2P release if you can rake in more money by selling EA and riding the hype as long as possible?
From that perspective, it makes sense to keep the game in this "half-state" of "pay to play now but maybe it will be F2P soonish" because that also keeps the hype going with discussions along the lines of "When is it gonna be F2P?". If they are too upfront about their F2P roadmap they would cannibalize their EA sales, as nobody would buy the EA and just wait for the F2P release.
It's like the calculated reverse version of "Oh crap our game does horribly, better go F2P".

I actually saw a saw physical copy for sale at target. 59.99 . They're saying it's going to be free to play but they're selling full priced discs. The disc was behind a glass case so it might just contain a paper with a download code

It isn’t uncommon to pay for early access to the game, and they name the purchases as “packs” which is fairly common, and it was pretty easy for me to see I was paying for a few items and early access to the game.

As an informed consumer I knew what was going on without needing to do much work. I figured that it would be free at some point but if you want to play now you can pay for access to the game early.

If this bothers you he easy answer is don’t buy it and wait for the game to go free to play.

The idea is probably to weed out players who won’t be invested in the game and thus might waste server space. From what I played it seems near impossible to do things solo.

Yeah right after I watched the quick look, I went on gamestop's website for something else and I saw they were selling digital codes as well as hard discs. Weird for an unfinished game to be sold at retail. Really weird.

For what it's worth, the PS4 store also has a free version of the game. In the description it then says you need a paid bundle in order to play it at the moment. So you can actually see that there's a free version, and it's visibly marked as early access.

@par1val: again, they did this with Paragon. I would expect this to potentially just be the same situation.