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Gearbox to publish Epic's Fortnite on disc

Four days before digital version, year before it goes free-to-play.

Borderlands studio Gearbox will publish Epic's sandbox survival game Fortnite on a disc in Europe on 21st July.

That's four days before the game becomes available to download digitally, on 25th July.

And it's around a year before the game's planned move to free-to-play, which will happen at some point in 2018.

Disc versions of the game will be available for all of its platforms - PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - in a Founder's Pack edition. Unspecified "loot, weapons and heroes" are promised.

Fortnite isn't the first time Gearbox has dabbled in publishing duties. The studio began its publishing initiative last year with Homeworld Remastered Collection, and most recently published Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition.

Fortnite has been in development for six years, but has recently gotten back on track for imminent arrival in Early Access - one you can pay anything between £35 and £125 to play. Until early next year, that is, when it goes properly free-to-play after around seven years from its first announcement.

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Our man Chris Tapsell played the game earlier this month, and found it a mix of gaming tropes from recent times - building and defending forts, loot boxes, collectible cards, heroes, skill trees and more.

"If only Fortnite was just about the building and the defending, I carry on thinking to myself, staring at the endless, between-game tabs of cards and characters," Chris wrote in our Fortnite preview. "But then that would be Orcs Must Die - and orcs are much more in vogue than zombies now, anyway."

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