Ed Sheeran has revealed he turned down a Fortnite collaboration because he doesn’t play the hit battle royale game.
Fortnite has featured a number of huge artists in a variety of limited-edition events. Billie Eilish, The Weeknd, Metallica, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have all headlined Fortnite Festival, with custom skins and bespoke emotes added to the game. Daft Punk hosted an interactive event that allowed fans to remix 31 tracks from across the dance duo’s back catalogue while Ariana Grande and Travis Scott have played virtual gigs inside Fortnite.
However Ed Sheeran has revealed he turned down the chance to appear in Fortnite because it wouldn’t feel authentic.
“Whenever you see my face near any product, I want it to be something I actually do,” he said during an interview on the Warne’s Way podcast. “Like ketchup, I fucking love ketchup. Guitars, I play the guitars I play. The reason I’m here today is because I’m launching a speaker with Orange, and I’ve used Orange amps for years. It has to be real. And so when my record company were like ‘oh, we can put you in Fortnite’, I was like ‘I don’t really want to do that’. I don’t play Fortnite but I do play Pokémon, so we contacted The Pokémon Company.”
In 2022, Sheeran released ‘Celestial’, which appeared during the end credits of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet.
I respect him a lot for this. He has a brand he wants to build and Fortnite is not a part of that. He just simply doesn’t have a connection to the game. Big ups for Ed lol https://t.co/TTJoLwwdxk
— AriesTakeda (@ariestakeda) March 31, 2026
“I love this. Nothing but love for the Fortnite team but I’ll always have respect for artists who turn down gaming collaborations because they don’t feel it’s the right fit for them,” wrote one fan on X. “I don’t care about him or his music but I respect this mentality a lot,” added another. “I could clown on this and say ‘wow thank god we’re never getting an Ed Sheeran Fortnite Festival season’ but honestly, big respect to Ed for this. We only wants his face near products he actually uses and believes in, actually a W for integrity,” said a third.
It comes after Ed Sheeran’s brief cameo in Game Of Thrones season seven received backlash from viewers who claimed he was out of place in the HBO series. “At the time I was just everywhere, so I think it was quite jarring,” he said while appearing on Benny Blanco’s Friends Keep Secrets podcast earlier this year. “[It] happens quite a lot in my career, I just get shit on for things [but] I enjoyed doing it.”
Earlier this month, Fortnite owners Epic Games scrapped three games and laid off more than 1000 members of staff “to keep the company funded”. It comes after the price of in-game currency V-bucks went up “to help pay the bills”.
In other news, it’s been reported that Rockstar Games has spent more than £2.7billion developing Grand Theft Auto 6, making it the most expensive video game of all time.