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 DC's 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 wasn't 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.We can't say why Epic has chosen not to hold any form of its annual pride event this year, since the company did not respond to our multiple requests for comment. That leaves us to speculate that this decision by Epic to skip Pride is the result of the new Trump administration's 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 administration's queerphobic policies, if it just wants to avoid any "controversy" that might fire up the right, or if there's some other reason entirely.But we've 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 skipped its annual Pride event, with Jagex's CEO Jon Bellamy saying that Pride is "now controversial in a way it didn’t used to be and that controversy now brings more risk than it did previously, risk that I’m 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 didn’t expect," Bellamy went on. These comments didn't do much to assuage the game's LGBTQIA+ community.Since Epic hasn't made any public comment about Rainbow Royale's status, it's 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.