It is exactly as real as bitcoin.
> It doesn't cost the company anything.
To see this isn't true let's imagine they give away billion points to each player at once. How will their profits from that game change? I expect a big drop.
You can buy a car with bitcoin, but you cannot buy a car with fortnite bucks, that's generally the metric I use to tell how real a currency is and how usable it is.
And they're not giving everybody billions. They're forgoing some fraction of $.07B that represents the revenue they would have otherwise captured. My guess is the fraction of people who spend less on these games because they got a little free in-game currency is near-zero and they might actually see a bump in revenue because they can now send out a marketing blast telling inactive users they have a reason to come back.
In other words, it's not really comparable to any cryptocurrency. Heck, even Steam's stickers/pictures you can unlock by playing games are more of a currency as you can sell (and buy) them for real money.
This is like paying a settlement to employees in a company script instead of legal tender.
I wonder about that. The motive in the in-game economy is to have, and spend, more than other players, right? Handing out in-game money to all participants might disrupt things in that everyone can now buy the fancy in-game items, but the competitive/relative component presumably remains. If you want even more in-game items than other players, the dynamic is still there: you still need to pay up.
You could even mitigate the former by compensating players by providing them more currency in proportion to the pre-devaluation purchasing power of their virtual wallet.
Item prices are fixed by the developer, aren't they? edit I suppose that just kicks the stone down the road. There would still be devaluation in the sense that scarce and expensive items become commonplace.