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The user-generated content (“UGC”) train showed no sign of slowing down in 2024, with engagement at all-time highs, launches of new tools powered by artificial intelligence further lowering the barrier of creation, and more brands and intellectual property owners fully embracing the potential of UGC platforms. As a whole, the UGC segment has been getting more sophisticated, from developers releasing increasingly polished titles to agencies and brands understanding how best to reach their desired audiences in more successful and authentic ways. The ecosystem is maturing at an incredible pace.

• The two main UGC platforms, Roblox and Fortnite Creative, saw great increases in engagement compared to 2023. In its Q4 2024 press release, Roblox reported substantial year-over-year growth in all metrics, including the key ones of bookings ($4.4B, +24% YoY growth) and DAUs (82.93M, +21% YoY growth). There was a slight hiccup when short seller Hindenburg Research released a critical report called “Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids”. It created some panic with investors and Roblox’s stock price dipped temporarily, but the intended sell-off never materialized. Roblox has refuted the claims, and the stock price has gone up more than 50% since then. We’ll be digging deeper into Hindenburg’s claims later on.
• Fortnite Creative (the UGC ecosystem) also had a good year, seeing average daily player numbers up 15% YoY. UEFN, the game engine for Fortnite Creative, became much more capable during 2024, with the long-awaited Verse Persistence feature, which allows creators to save their progress, debuting in March last year. This has meant that creators could make much more diverse experiences. However, arguably the most important feature added to Fortnite Creative last year was direct links to Fortnite Islands. Finally, no more typing in map codes!
• The modding ecosystem has also grown, with the number of downloads skyrocketing and top platforms, such as CurseForge, Nexus Mods, and Mod.io, all experiencing downloads growth exceeding 40%. More and more games are also embracing official mod support, either by integrating with third-party platforms — such as the recently announced CurseForge integration for Hogwarts Legacy — or by providing their own tools, like Starfield's Creation Kit. Overwolf’s CurseForge also unveiled premium mods (starting in ARK: Survival Ascended), which have already generated seven figures in revenue, opening up exciting, new monetization opportunities for talented creators.
• Over on mobile, outside of Roblox, UGC has not taken off in the same way. NetEase’s Eggy Party became a viral hit in China at the tail end of 2022 thanks to its creation tools — launched globally in February 2024 — but has not been a hit. It failed to gain traction outside China, which makes up more than 70% of all its users. Tencent’s much-vaunted competitor, Project: Fun Party (元梦之星), came and went with a whimper, launching at the tail end of 2023. Currently, it has less than a third of the users Eggy Party has. Mediatonic also threw its hat into the mobile ring, with Fall Guys finally being available on mobile via the Epic Games Store app on Android and iOS (Europe-only). However, the creation studio is available only on PC/console, and the process to install Fall Guys is quite convoluted, preventing it from making a mark.
• Brand engagement has grown from strength to strength, with Roblox doubling (from 200 to 400) the number of brand activations from the time period between Roblox Developers Conference 2023 and RDC 2024. Fortnite Creative has also become a home for brands aiming to reach the coveted college-aged male demographic. However, how brands are thinking about going into the UGC segment has shifted. The exuberance of 2023, when brands piled into the segment with their own bespoke experiences, gave way to reality in 2024 — namely that slapping a brand/IP/celebrity on an experience was no guarantee of success. Instead, brands have leveraged embedding into existing popular experiences and saw much more cost-effective results.

As in last year’s UGC report, we’ll cover the key moments of 2024 for Roblox and Fortnite, as well as look at the world of live-service UGC and modding platforms. Finally, we’ll break down creator earnings to see what changed since 2023.

The State of Roblox

The behemoth of UGC has had a great 2024, with most of its KPIs seeing 20% or greater growth:

• Revenue was $3.6B, up 29% YoY
• Bookings totaled $4.4B, up 24% YoY
• Hours engaged reached 73.5B, up 23% YoY
• DAUs were 82.9M, up 21% YoY

At RDC 2024, Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki unveiled a grand vision for the future: Roblox capturing 10% of all gaming revenue, or about $18B in annual revenue (based on Newzoo’s 2024 Global Games Market Report). To help realize this vision, the company identified three pillars it would be doubling down on.

No. 1: Bringing People Together

Roblox introduced the “Party” feature, which allows users aged 9 and above to seamlessly group up, discover, and join experiences together. This feature includes text communication, with voice chat available for phone-verified users aged 13 and older. It also rebranded Group into Communities, supplementing it with other tools, such as Forums. 

No. 2: Scaling Creation and Access

Roblox invested heavily in infrastructure in previous years, spending $426M in 2022 and $321M in 2023 on purchasing servers and other infrastructure equipment. Due to that investment, it was able to scale down infrastructure expenditure in 2024, spending “just” $180M. This has resulted in Roblox being decently free cash flow (FCF) positive, ending 2024 with $641M in FCF, an increase of +417% YoY. Besides leveraging its infrastructure investments to efficiently host the 89M DAU every day, it is also using its compute power to pioneer the use of generative AI. Roblox has released several AI-powered tools: automated Avatar creation and texturing, real-time text translation, and improvements to Roblox Studio’s Assistant that greatly improves its effectiveness, lowering the barrier to creation. And it is not stopping there. During RDC 2024, Roblox announced an incubation project for an AI-powered multimodal 3D foundational model that would allow developers to create and modify complete environments with just a text prompt.

No. 3: Helping Creators Build Their Businesses

The big news here was the link between the digital and physical, as Roblox announced a partnership with Shopify that would enable creators to sell physical merchandise. Further, Roblox finally unlocked higher revenue share for its creators through a paid access in local currency program, where creators could charge players real money to enter their experiences, unlocking up to 70% revenue share versus the typical 25-30%.

Seeing Roblox post such ambitious goals and strategizing — and, importantly, executing on its objectives year-over-year — has been one of the highlights of watching the company over the years. And as we take a look at what it has accomplished over 2024, keep in mind that we haven’t even been close to seeing Roblox’s final form.

Improvements to the Platform

As in our report last year, we’ll be looking at the initiatives Roblox undertook in 2024 in the following areas:

1. User base expansion
2. Platform expansion
3. New creator tools 
4. Enhanced monetization
5. Discovery optimization 

User Base Expansion

Last year, the primary growth drivers for engagement were from international expansion in countries such as Japan, Germany, Brazil, and India. This has only accelerated in 2024, with Asia-Pacific (APAC) and rest of the world (ROW) showcasing even stronger growth in DAUs and engagement.

APAC and ROW remain the leading regions for user growth, with DAUs increasing 30% and 27% YoY, respectively, driven by strong performance in countries such as Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia. The U.S. and Canada saw a 15% increase — modest in percentage terms but significant in absolute numbers, as the U.S. alone added 1.5M DAU YoY, with only Brazil coming close at 1.2M. Meanwhile, Europe recorded the weakest growth at just 6%, continuing a declining trend that began in Q3 2022.

Those are the short-term trends, which are impressive enough, but when you look at the long-term trajectory, Roblox is absolutely killing it. Post-COVID slump? Looks like Roblox never got the memo.

As a side note, there was an interesting bump in DAUs in the third quarter, particularly in the U.S. and Canada and ROW, as we can see in the chart above.

While we were unable to find any clear sources for this blip in DAUs, our current investigation leads us to believe that Dress to Impress, which went viral in the second and third quarters, could have been a trigger. It had been visited 2.3B times (according to this Eurogamer article) by Sept. 1, 2024, and at the time of writing, has more than doubled the visits to 5.9B.

In a case of mutual viral symbiosis, singer Charli XCX collaborated with Dress to Impress, sparking a surge of interest for both. Dress to Impress’s official TikTok account posted a video (16M views) on the collaboration between the two, leading to a burst of interest in the singer, and in turn also helping to catapult Dress to Impress’ mindshare.

Beyond geographic expansion, Roblox has consistently faced the question: Is the platform aging up? The answer, time and again, has been yes. Since 2019, the "Over 13" age cohort has grown three times as much as the "Under 13" group. Of course, some of this boost comes from younger players aging into the older segment. However, DAU growth among the "Under 13" cohort has been shrinking year over year, while the opposite is true among players older than 13 and at a rate much higher than you would expect if it was merely from players getting older, showing that Roblox is also attracting and retaining an older player base.

Platform Expansion

Mobile and desktop have remained the bedrock for growth. Roblox CFO Michael Guthrie said during the Q4 2024 earnings call that the company saw “very high growth in mobile and desktop, which has persisted across Q3 and Q4” last year.

What about the new platforms that were added in 2023 (PlayStation and Meta Quest)? PlayStation has been a success, as in that same call, Guthrie pointed out that the console’s Q4 2023 launch led to a surge in bookings, making year-over-year comparisons for Q4 2024 more “challenging”. Despite this, prepaid and console bookings, including PlayStation, grew 22% YoY in December 2024, and is continuing to show strong momentum into the first quarter of 2025.

On the Meta Quest side, Roblox has done so-so. It has around 8,800 reviews and a 3.8 star rating on the Meta Quest store, putting it in the 17th place when comparing it to all the other VR titles that have launched since Roblox was released to Quest users, despite being a free download. For context, the game at the top was Yeeps: Hide and Seek with 68,500 reviews (also a free download) with I Am Cat in second place with 59,300 reviews ($20).

There were no new platforms announced in 2024 (although the Switch 2 is coming soon in 2025). Instead, in 2024, Roblox focused on making sure as many devices would be able to experience Roblox as smoothly as possible by reducing crashes and increasing frame rate, ultimately resulting in an estimated additional 300M hours per year of playtime.

Not only that, it has committed to allowing developers to “host a high-performance, 100-player open world, sports or battle royale-type game on Roblox and have it run on 2 GB RAM devices anywhere in the world at good frame rates”.

Monetization Expansion

As mentioned in the intro, Roblox’s bookings saw substantial growth in 2024, with bookings (when a user purchases Robux or a Robux gift card) rising by 24% YoY. 

The U.S. and Canada market has always been the largest contributors to Roblox bookings, making up 62% of bookings in 2024. While ROW showed the most growth at 32%, it’s still a fraction of what North America contributes. 

Region	2024 Bookings	% Share	YoY Difference	YoY Growth
U.S. & Canada	$2.7B	62%	$489M	22%
Europe	$832M	19%	$174M	26%
APAC	$464M	11%	$95M	26%
ROW	$373M	9%	$91M	32%

That said, the share of bookings coming from APAC and ROW has been steadily rising. Over the five-year period from 2020 to 2024, bookings share from APAC and ROW have grown by 3%. That doesn’t sound like much, but APAC has gone from $140M in bookings in 2020 to $464M in 2024.

Overall, all regions saw revenue and bookings increase healthily year-over-year. Besides being driven by more users coming in, bookings growth was also attributed by Roblox to the enhancements it made to its platform in 2024:

• It opened up the Marketplace, where creators can sell custom avatars and items, to everyone. Instead of an application process to vet creators, creators who are ID-verified and have Roblox Premium 1000 or 2000 can upload, publish, and sell in the Marketplace.
• The economy team launched dynamic price floors in the Marketplace on certain avatar items, increasing average prices for items and overall spending.
• A slew of discovery-related enhancements were introduced. Why this matters to bookings will be covered in a bit:
  • Further changes to the AI-driven discovery algorithm, making it more personalized.
  • A new curated area on the homepage called Today’s Picks that features up-and-coming creations, updated experiences, and new genres. The goal of the feature is to get users to try more varied experiences.
  • The positioning of various content types on the home page, particularly Friends, Continue, Recommended for You, Sponsored Experiences, People You May Know, and Today’s Picks were optimized. Not only that, it recently introduced dynamic repositioning of “People You May Know” and “Continue” sorts. If People You May Know is more relevant to a user than Continue, it will physically move it up the homepage so players see it first.
  • It reintroduced platform-wide events, with Hunt: First Edition running in March 2024 on mobile, PC, console, and VR that led to increased engagement and re-engaged users.

The importance of discovery to monetization was shared by management in the Q3 2024 shareholder letter, in which the company broke down the interplay among DAUs, hours, and bookings. Roblox said it found a strong relationship between DAUs and bookings, as well as hours and bookings. 

What this means is that shifting the needle in DAUs or hours is very highly likely to result in an impact in bookings (pretty much common sense, but now backed with data!), so if Roblox can show players more experiences they enjoy and will play more often, the more likely they’ll spend.

The result has been a slight increase in monetization efficiency, with average bookings per DAU (ABPDAU) increasing from $12.83 in 2023 to $13.14 in 2024, a growth of +2.4% YoY. 

When broken down into regions, though, we can see that this average was dragged down by APAC.

	2023	2024	YoY Change
US & Canada	$36.82	$37.90	2.94%
Europe	$8.63	$9.80	13.52%
APAC	$5.77	$5.54	-3.94%
ROW	$3.83	$4.06	6.07%

There was a surge of users coming in from Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines in 2024, all countries with lower ABPDAU, which may explain why ABPDAU in APAC contracted.

There were also two key monetization improvements that were announced at RDC 2024. The first was a partnership with Shopify, allowing creators who also sell physical goods on Shopify to also sell them in a Roblox experience. This was a big first step in Roblox also becoming an e-commerce platform. The feature is still in beta testing, with Catalog Avatar Creator being one of the launch testers, collaborating with Lootbloc to sell CAC merch in-game. However, the store isn’t currently available in CAC, suggesting that it is still under testing and not ready for a full rollout.    

The other big monetization news was that developers would be able to charge real money for access to their experiences, with a greater revenue share of 50% to 70%. This has the potential to open up the type of experiences that can be viable on Roblox. However, developer feedback has been one of concern, particularly that the minimum purchase price ($9.99) is quite high. In the Roblox developer forum post announcing this feature, Archmage, developer of one of the most popular paid experiences, Deepwoken, said, “This is a very exciting initiative, but we won’t be implementing it in Deepwoken until there are cheaper price points. I don’t believe there have been many successful paid access games on Roblox sold above $5 USD.” 

So far, we haven't been able to find a significant local currency paid access title. Like Archmage, developers who are already generating revenue may be concerned that the added friction could lead to fewer purchases, reducing overall earnings despite a higher revenue share. There also doesn’t seem to be a big appetite for paid experiences on Roblox. Though Deepwoken (the most successful paid access game) has had more than 1B visits, the next biggest experience, Mighty Omega, has only 53.6M.

Creator Tool Expansion

Toolset

The big improvements to the Creator Tool were in the area of GenAI. One of the big steps toward making “every user a creator” was the full launch of Roblox Studio’s AI-powered Assistant. GenAI has been available in various forms for a while now, from code completion, automatic translation, package diff, texture generation, material generation, and avatar setup.

However, the full release of Assistant is a game changer due to the fact that it is integrated with the data model of the game, allowing it to:

• Add and edit objects and scripts directly
• Insert objects from the Creator Store
• Create scripted behaviors
• Create materials
• Answer how to do things on Roblox
• "Explain this code" by selecting parts of a script in the Script Editor

It’s all very impressive when watching the individual demonstrations. However, when looking at how several YouTubers, such as SlumOperator, try to use Assistant to make a game, a couple things are clear:

• It’s not seamless and definitely not at the “click the ‘make game’ button” level yet, needing more targeted prompts.
• Experienced devs are unlikely to leverage Assistant except for the simplest tasks.

So far, consensus among the dev community is mixed. Experienced devs are not finding it very useful yet, but newer or less skilled developers have been leveraging its abilities.

The big thing here is that it opens up creation for people completely inexperienced with game development. It’s easy for a beginner to click a part and write, “I want this to move left and right,” and you can get that behavior immediately. While it’s not at the state yet that a new developer could rely on it to develop a game from scratch, it makes the initial entry point much less intimidating, ultimately lowering the barrier of entry. There’s also the fact that this is the worst Assistant will ever be, and it is likely to improve by leaps and bounds very quickly. Roblox being a first mover here bodes well for staying ahead of the curve, giving more reasons for current and emerging talent to stick around. 

Analytics

A significant update in mid-2024 finally enabled detailed analysis of engagement and monetization data through Economy and Funnels analytics. While Roblox devs have been able to integrate third-party analytics for some time, a customizable built-in feature was long awaited. 

Being able to dissect information such as where players are leaving your game and where they are spending their Robux (or not) is invaluable, and allows many creators to better optimize their experiences.

Discovery

Roblox has continued to invest in features to help games get noticed. From improving the algorithms behind recommendations, the Today’s Top Picks section we called out above, dynamic repositioning of elements on the home page, to increasing the number of impressions available for sponsored ads on the homepage by five times compared to the year before, it’s clear that getting more quality games seen by more people is important to the platform’s success.

So much so that Roblox has committed to be transparent about its search and discovery algorithm, including providing visibility on what it values, how it rewards attributes that drive distribution, and how developer’s experiences are performing based on those values.

The changes appear to have worked because more experiences are breaking into the top 100. And in Q2 2024, there were 25 experiences on Roblox with more than 1M DAUs. Not only that, in the fourth-quarter earnings call, Baszucki said that “in-experience hours for experiences beyond the top 1,000 grew faster than our top 1,000 this year”.

Developer Payouts

Total payout to developers reached $922M in 2024, a 25% increase year-over-year. More importantly, the growth in average income for creators outside the top 10 have been growing at a faster rate over the past five years.

Zooming out, payouts to developers have been growing steadily from 2019 to 2024, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52%. The percent of bookings has also grown over time, stabilizing at a baseline of 22% of bookings from 2022 onward.

Roblox has also shown a willingness to support a broader range of creators. Besides changes to the discovery algorithm, it also lowered the requirements for cashing out, reducing it from 100,000 Robux to 30,000 Robux in 2023. This resulted in the number of payout eligible creators doubling to 20,000 in 2023 from 11,000 the year before, with a median payout of $1,645. 

We also ran the numbers shared by Roblox during RDC 2024 to make estimates of creator payouts using a power law curve.

Our estimates show that the 1,000th creator is earning around $100,000, a significant increase on the $60,000 a creator of the same rank was earning in 2023.

The State of Brands

As we covered last year, brands were entering Roblox in full force, with the number of branded experiences doubling year-over-year. We also called out that many of the experiences struggled to drive engagement. But that was 2023. How did brands fare in 2024?

We looked at the branded experiences tracked by Romonitorstats (a total of 172) and charted them by release date. To assess engagement, we looked at the average annualized visits per experience (to even the playing field), and the results are telling. There were significantly fewer branded games released in 2024 than during the previous years, and the reason can be seen in the annualized visits per experience, as the newer the game, the fewer visits there are, on average.

As we mentioned last year, the high cost of launching a standalone experience meant the majority of the brands were not close to seeing any return on investment. Instead, in 2024, brands turned to already popular titles to perform their activations. 

Some examples were:

• Glass Animals integration in Pls Donate
• Coldplay’s multi-game takeover in Car Dealership Tycoon, Tower of Misery, Starving Artists, and Really Easy Obby
• The integration of Bomb Pop, a popular ice pop brand, into Restaurant Tycoon 2
• Specsavers’ addition of its Specsavers Obby into Super Fun Obby, Chill Obby, and Ultimate Easy Obby
• The Voice pop-up stores, which appeared in multiple experiences

Besides creating an experience or doing an integration, other ways brands can be in Roblox is through its immersive ads, which were launched in 2023 to great fanfare. However, feedback from developers was that the revenue gained did not justify showing the billboards nor teleporting players to advertiser’s experiences. One developer estimated an eCPM of $0.20 for displaying the billboards and a mere 3 Robux per teleport.

Ostensibly to help increase ad budgets in Roblox — and in return, boost developer payouts — Roblox announced a partnership with WPP, a global advertising and marketing conglomerate, in October 2024. The goal of the partnership is to help global brands leverage Roblox as an immersive media channel by developing expertise, measurement standards, and creative activations within the platform. It remains to be seen if this education approach will give confidence to brands in Roblox as an advertising platform.

It’s also worth mentioning that to date, much of the marketing budgets allocated to Roblox have been experimental and only a fraction of total brand spending. Roblox has more to prove if it wants to scale that up. However, what's in Roblox's favor is that this is the leading channel for reaching a young demographic. Even if imperfect, it might be one of the only ways for brands to build awareness with kids and teens ... and over time, that alone may be worth the investment to figure this out more at scale.

Lastly, it should be mentioned that advertising revenue generally bypasses the platform tax, meaning advertising revenue is likely higher margin to Roblox and a higher take rate for creators. That alone makes it worth figuring out for Roblox in the years to come. We suspect this is just the beginning.

Official Anime Arrives to Roblox

It's no secret that many experiences in UGC are built off the popularity of anime. In 2024, official anime experiences were finally fully released, with arguably the largest anime IP of this era, One Piece: Grand Arena, making its debut in the middle of the year. There were official anime experiences released earlier, such as My Hero Academia: Battlegrounds and One Piece: East Blue Brawls, but these were — and remain — in tech testing or beta status. However, Grand Arena’s rather shallow gameplay meant that even the power of the One Piece IP was not enough to keep players interested. It has garnered a total of 7.8M visits as of publication, but averaged just 131 current concurrent users (CCUs). Still, it has been a positive start, and we’re sure to see more official anime experiences in 2025.

Weathering the Hindenburg Storm

In October 2024, short seller Hindenburg Research released a report slamming Roblox in five main areas:

1. Financial Performance: Hindenburg highlighted that Roblox has reported net losses every quarter since becoming a public company in March 2021.
2. Misrepresentation of DAUs: The report claimed that due to alternate or bot accounts, the actual number of unique users of Roblox is inflated by 25% to 42%.
3. Overstated Engagement Hours: Hindenburg said it analyzed 7,200 Roblox games across 2.1M servers and found that users actually spend about 22 minutes per day in games versus the 2.4 hours reported by Roblox. The report also highlighted the presence of bot accounts that remain active for extended periods, further skewing engagement metrics.
4. Inadequate Moderation: The report criticized Roblox for insufficient moderation, despite a large portion of its user base being children. Games with inappropriate themes, such as "Escape to Epstein Island" and "Diddy Party," have all been hosted on the platform. Registered as a child, the researchers were also able to access adult groups and content, Hindenburg said.
5. Facilitation of Predatory Behavior: The report noted that since 2018, more than 20 individuals in the U.S. have been arrested for crimes involving minors met on Roblox.

The report caused some consternation from investors, but unfortunately for Hindenburg (which has since shut down), the mass sell-off it envisioned never eventuated, and the stock rebounded within a couple days. So did investors just not care about these seemingly alarming points, or was there something else? In short, the claims were vastly overstated.

In terms of the “inflated” user counts and engagement hours, each earnings report has explained that DAUs are a measure of account activity, not unique individuals. The earnings reports also specifically call out fraudulent accounts created using bots to inflate user activity, and say that Roblox strives to detect and minimize those instances. 

For hours engaged, Hindenburg misrepresented the analysis since Roblox defines its hours engaged as time spent on the entire platform, which includes time spent in Roblox Studio, chat, avatar customization, the Creator Store, as well as experiences. Comparing that with the 22 minutes of actual in-game time was merely misdirection.

Even prior to Hindenburg’s report, Roblox had been criticized for its safety practices, particularly with children. Perhaps spurred on by that, it has invested heavily in safety and civility. In 2024, even before the Hindenburg report, it published several blog posts detailing the various ways the company handles moderation and upholds community standards. We’ve summarized them here:

• Multimodal AI systems: Roblox utilizes AI to moderate various content types, including text, voice, images, and 3D models.
• Real-time voice moderation: AI-driven systems to monitor voice communications, providing immediate feedback to users who violate policies. Since rolling this out, Roblox saw a 53% reduction in abuse reports per DAU, when related to voice communication.
• Proactive content review: Every piece of content uploaded to Roblox undergoes thorough moderation using both automated tools and human oversight.
• Parental controls: Parents can link their children’s accounts, allowing them to monitor their friends lists, screen time, set spend limits, and more.
• Taking safety seriously: Roblox partners with leading safety organizations to develop frameworks that enhance online safety and civility, and supports industry-wide safety initiatives to improve child protection measures across digital spaces.
• Other initiatives: The above aren’t the only things that the company does regarding safety. This page lists all of the safety measures Roblox performs to protect its community.

These safety and moderation tools have been a work in progress, and many of the scare stories from the Hindenburg article were before many of these new tools were released. Ultimately, Roblox has proven that it has, and is, taking safety seriously, and that the many ways it is looking to combat bad actors has not been some knee jerk reaction to Hindenburg’s report.

Finally, though the report criticized Roblox for being unprofitable, nothing in the report was questioning the validity of the company's financials. Even disregarding all the elements above, if Hindenburg could not find any issues with how Roblox was running the business, it really had no leg to stand on.

Summary

It’s impressive the way Roblox has been able to plan and execute its way to reaching its vision of 1B DAUs. Like a snowball, it has been steadily compounding for many years, growing ever bigger as it continues its journey to become a dominant force in the digital entertainment ecosystem. Every new feature and initiative can be weighed against its ultimate goal, with no fluff or excess. It also understands its creator base well, on one hand lowering the bar to creation, but also balancing that with improved discoverability to allay developer fears that they will get swallowed up by a wave of new incoming developers. Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, we can expect to see more of everything: More developers entering the ecosystem, more new successful experiences, and more brands shifting marketing dollars to the platform. 

The State of Fortnite Creative

Fortnite Creative had a mixed 2024. On the positive side, its creator count nearly tripled, from 24,000 in 2023 to 70,000 in 2024; DAUs for Creator Islands were up 15% year-over-year; and UEFN made great progress in enabling even more diverse experiences. 

As a result, Fortnite Creative has become a destination for brands wanting to reach its predominantly male 18-24 demographic, such as Top Golf, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Manchester City Football Club,  Spongebob Square Pants, and ESL. All good news for the platform.

On the downside, average CCUs on the Fortnite platform have decreased since the Big Bang, the major Fortnite event in December 2023 that revealed the return of the OG map, Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival. It actually went back down to pre-Big Bang levels in the middle of 2024, but the Big Bang 2.0 in December 2024, where Epic released a slew of first-party experiences, has brought that up.

On the creator side, though, more creators received payouts than ever before, and the total payout in 2024 reached a record-high of $352M, up 11% (comparing March-December periods of 2023 and 2024). 

However, the vast majority (89%) of those who earned anything made less than $1,000 per year, largely because there was a huge influx of creators (from 24k in 2023 to 70k in 2024).

In June 2024, Epic also made adjustments to the payout formula to prioritize the acquisition of new users, and many creators reported payouts reducing as a result. We’ll break down the details of creator payouts later.

Epic’s First-Party Experiences and Events

Last year, we covered Fortnite’s Big Bang, when it launched Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival. Since then, Epic has added even more first-party experiences in a mid-year update, plus what we call Big Bang 2.0 in December.

Mid-year Update — June 2024

• Fortnite Reload: A faster, squad-focused version of the traditional battle royale mode with 40 players.
• Festival Battle Stage: A 16-player elimination competitive version of Fortnite Festival.

Big Bang 2.0 — December 2024

• Fortnite OG: The OG map was re-released as a season of the Battle Royale mode in November 2023, setting a 100M MAU record. This was brought back permanently as a standalone map.
• Fortnite Ballistic: A team-based FPS, similar to Counter-Strike, was also released in December 2024. This was preceded by the release of an experimental First Person Camera Mode in UEFN in November. The First Person Camera Mode moved to beta (and thus players could release islands using it) the same day that Ballistic went live, an intentional move so creator maps could not steal its thunder.
• Lego Fortnite Odyssey: Lego Fortnite was renamed Lego Fortnite Odyssey, along with a new biome, dungeons, enemies, items, and a new villain, the Storm King.
• Lego Fortnite Brick Life: A simple social sandbox where you can build a house, do simple jobs, buy decor, and hang out with friends. Splitting up the sandbox experience into two makes sense; for people who don’t want combat and just want to chill, Brick Life will be a more relaxing alternative.

What has the slew of updates meant? The chart of monthly average CCUs below shows that after the huge spike of users from the original OG re-release and Big Bang 1.0, CCUs trended down over the next six months and was resuscitated by the mid-year update and Big Bang 2.0. It never reached the peak of engagement as the original, but it was always a hard act to follow. 

However, it is slightly concerning to see that engagement dropped back to pre-Big Bang levels during summer 2024 and was only resurrected by large event updates above. This means that while on the whole, 2024 saw greater engagement than 2023, Fortnite hasn’t been able to significantly increase its engagement baseline and is reliant on these resource-heavy mega events to prop up the player count. Success of the greater ecosystem lives and dies by Fortnite engagement (particularly with engagement-based payouts), and keeping that in mind will help frame Epic’s moves over the past year and its future plans.

What about for creators? Looking at a snapshot of the top maps being played on Fortnite at the time of writing, we see that Epic first-party experiences have got almost the entire top 10 on lock, including the new Reload and OG maps. In contrast, a year ago, half the top 10 were creator maps.

Rank	Name	Source	Players Now	All-Time Peak	CCU %
1	Zero Build - Battle Royale	Epic	152,276	2,880,144	25.82%
2	Battle Royale	Epic	83,779	6,537,887	14.21%
3	Fortnite OG Chapter 1 Season 2	Epic	77,461	1,306,854	13.14%
4	Ranked Reload	Epic	44,318	449,837	7.52%
5	Fortnite OG Zero Build - C1S2	Epic	37,541	342,294	6.37%
6	Reload	Epic	37,126	821,815	6.30%
7	Reload - Zero Build	Epic	20,290	240,523	3.44%
8	LEGO Fortnite Odyssey	Epic	17,303	2,447,763	2.93%
9	Save The World	Epic	11,902	76,630	2.02%
10	🐐 GO GOATED! Zone Wars 🌀	Creator	10,797	111,777	1.83%
11	Ranked Battle Royale	Epic	10,563	1,440,170	1.79%
12	Festival Main Stage	Epic	9,203	847,466	1.56%
13	The Pit - Free For All	Creator	8,221	139,621	1.39%
14	Super Trickshot Parkour 🎯 Sniper	Creator	7,635	20,845	1.29%
15	Ranked Fortnite OG	Epic	7,153	181,070	1.21%
16	Ranked Ballistic	Epic	7,136	168,970	1.21%
17	TILTED ZONE WARS ⭐ (AM)	Creator	6,871	212,530	1.17%
18	Piece Control 2v2 🎯	Creator	6,021	82,795	1.02%
19	Ranked Zero Build	Epic	5,575	166,317	0.95%
20	CRAZY RED VS BLUE 🔴🔵	Creator	5,437	163,049	0.92%
21	OCTO GAME 2 문어 게임	Creator	5,413	118,692	0.92%
22	MURDER MYSTERY	Creator	5,208	36,210	0.88%
23	Bed Wars	Creator	4,638	66,058	0.79%
24	PANDVIL Box Fights (2v2) 📦	Creator	4,065	89,676	0.69%
25	1V1 WITH EVERY GUN	Creator	3,755	35,639	0.64%

To make matters more stark, of the top 25 games, Epic experiences make up 88.46% (an increase of 7% YoY) of all CCUs, leaving the other creator maps with a mere 12% to fight over. Another thing is also clear, Fortnite players just really, really like Battle Royale modes, as it took up 80% of CCUs.

This isn’t so different from what we found out in our 2024 report. However, the difference was that last year, the new Creator 2.0 payout model meant that although engagement in creative maps decreased by 35%, payouts actually doubled. The engagement payout formula changing to prioritize the acquisition of new players means that even if all of Epic’s new experiences brought in a net new audience, creators would not see a big benefit. Instead of lifting all boats, Epic seems to be taking a larger slice of the pie.

There’s also the fact that Epic has released new experiences with abilities beyond what UEFN can produce, or have given itself a headstart in creating new modes with new tools.

According to Brendan Stock, CEO and co-founder of Chartis.gg, “It can be frustrating for creators when new tools, such as the First Person mode, are released in the editor at the same time as these first-party experiences, or if the first-party experiences have additional capabilities (i.e Brick Life in Lego mode) unavailable to creators. Epic's first-party game clearly had a long development period, while creators were only given around six weeks to experiment with the first-person device.”

While there’s understandably a lot of angst amongst the creator community now, with Epic seemingly in competition with the very creators it is banking the future of the ecosystem on, the fact is Fortnite is still in the beginning of its UGC lifecycle. There was a span of 14 years from Roblox launching to the release of Brookhaven. Fortnite is sprinting full-speed ahead, don’t get me wrong, but the toolset is still a work-in-progress, and the audience is only slowly beginning to notice that perhaps modes other than Battle Royale are worth their time. 

As mentioned above, Fortnite engagement is key to platform success. What Epic is doing is, while continuing to build out the tools, releasing new experiences to keep players engaged (and ideally to get new players) so that when the day comes that a Brookhaven or Dress to Impress game arrives, the audience is already there.

And one of the new ways it is looking to acquire and maintain this audience is a partnership with Disney, a huge announcement (see trailer here) in February 2024 of a Disney-Epic partnership to build a “persistent, open and interoperable ecosystem that will bring together the Disney and Fortnite communities”.

How this ecosystem works remains to be seen. Disney has confirmed that creators “will be able to create their own stories and experiences, express their fandom in a distinctly Disney way”, perhaps somewhat like how Lego Elements can be used in UEFN.  But based on this interview, and as we see in the last scene in the trailer (see image above), Disney will also be hosting its own experiences, adding more competition for player attention. But whatever it ends up being, it will cause a big splash upon release that will hopefully bring in a wave of new players that will trickle down to the creator maps.

Creator Tool Expansion

During 2024, Epic made numerous improvements to UEFN, including:

• NPC Spawner: Allows creators to add customizable NPCs to make their islands more lively.
• Analytics: Creators can track gameplay metrics to help improve engagement.
• Verse Persistence: Finally, creators could make islands where data could be kept between sessions. This change completely opened up the type of games you can build in UEFN.
• Meta Human Integration: Paired with the NPC Spawner, creators can now make realistic and high-fidelity NPCs.
• Lego Assets: Creators could now use Lego assets to build islands.
• Unreal Revision Control: Version control in UEFN — a huge boon to team collaboration.
• First Person Camera Mode: While there previously were workarounds to doing first-person games in UEFN, this made it much easier to get up and started.
• Island Linking: Finally, you don’t need to copy-paste map codes. Each island now comes with a unique URL, allowing creators to easily share their maps. This also opens up the possibility of running external user acquisition campaigns.
• Scene Graph (Experimental): While still in experimental mode, the Scene Graph organizes all the elements of an experience in a hierarchical manner. This makes it easier to create more complex behavior and gameplay.
• Engagement Payout Estimates: This was actually released in January 2025, but we thought it was important to highlight given the changes in the payout formula. Creators can now get an estimate of how much they’ll get on a monthly and daily basis.

The ability to do more with UEFN meant that creators could produce a greater variety of gameplay, resulting in non-combat experiences making up 30% of time spent (of creator maps) in 2024, an increase of ~50% year-over-year.

But undoubtedly, the biggest issue creators wanted improvement on was discovery, or at least some transparency around what Epic prioritizes when promoting islands. In a blog post and in Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, it crystallized the metrics Epic looks for into three areas:

• Attraction: How good is an island at getting players to come in, particularly of new or lapsed players?
• Engagement: How long do players spend on an island while being active? Do they come back after the initial session? And do they bring their friends in to play?
• Satisfaction: Do players give the island a high rating, add it to their favorites, and do they bring in their friends to play?

Epic also explained its “New Content Testing” strategy, where it picks ~4,000 islands to test every week, giving them a blast of 50,000 impressions in a short time (how short was undefined by Epic), then measuring them on the above axes to pick experiences to promote that are likely to do well.

All this explanation would be pointless without creators knowing how their experiences are actually performing in those metrics, so Epic updated UEFN analytics capabilities to report metrics aligned to those above.

Overall, Epic has made good on its promise to give creators more power to build more varied experiences and to understand how to improve them. That said, it still lags behind on what Roblox can provide, which brings us to the 2025 roadmap. Here, the most interesting items are:

• Enable HUD and Passive UI: This allows updating UI from gameplay data in Verse, opening up the ability to create more UI-heavy game genres.
• General Physics: An experimental feature that enables networked, physically-based characters and props. Think Totally Accurate Battle Simulator on Fortnite.
• Player Movement Device: This allows creators to tune the movement of characters.
• Custom Game Items: Another experimental feature, this allows creators to create custom items and inventories beyond just those from Battle Royale.
• Gameplay Attributes: A big one, this allows creators to specify and manipulate attributes in real time.

Interestingly, General Physics and Custom Game Items were also on the 2024 roadmap but have been delayed to this year.

Ultimately, all of these updates are good and should make creating more diverse experiences easier in UEFN. But as we covered above, the issue seems to be audience willingness to experiment with different genres. 

That said, things could be changing. In its Fortnite 2024 Ecosystem Review post, Epic mentioned that in January 2025, experiences not featuring combat, such as social roleplay, party games, deathruns, and horror, grew 50% year-over-year, making up 30% of all play time on creator-made Islands. It may be a case of creators getting comfortable with the new capabilities and experimenting with what’s possible, so we may see this value grow over time. Hopefully with more analytics at their fingertips and greater understanding of discovery, we should see more and more diverse and (more importantly) popular experiences in Fortnite in 2025.

As we mentioned above, it is a flawed move to compare Fortnite to Roblox. The success of Battle Royale, the hype from the Big Bang, and the super polished first-party experiences created an insurmountable expectation that creators would have the tools to be competitive instantly. As we see from Roblox, it takes years for the toolset to be robust enough. After all, here’s what one of the top experiences within the first five years of Roblox looks like (Work at a Pizza Place).

Developer Payouts

In 2024, Epic paid out $352M to creators, an increase of 11% year-over-year — certainly a great achievement. It also published its “Creator Count By Annual Payout Threshold” chart for 2024, as seen below.

At first glance, it all seems fine. It’s expected that the majority of experiences would not earn that much. But by comparing to the 2023 figures, we see the year-over-year creator growth per payout threshold in the chart below.

The growth was overwhelmingly coming from the low-tier thresholds of under $10k per year, which, as we mentioned above, was due to the huge influx of creators. However, there were fewer experiences earning $1M+ in 2024 than in 2023 (61 versus 58). 

This shift was likely a result of the revamped engagement payout that occurred in July 2024. In a nutshell, the formula became more weighted to “reward creators who are bringing new players into Fortnite and are re-engaging lapsed players.” Unsurprisingly, this is the same Attract, Engage, Satisfy rubric for its discovery algorithm.

The results were significant. According to Brendan, “Some creators in the ecosystem reported a 30-50% decrease in payouts, while a few maps, particularly those without previous data, performed better than the estimated payouts from Fortnite.gg. In fact, one of our maps exceeded Fortnite.gg's estimates by 30% in August.” This may explain why there were fewer experiences earning more than $1M, as these were all entrenched maps with a steady player base. 

When you connect the dots — Fortnite's struggle to grow baseline engagement, the reliance on tentpole events, the Disney partnership, and the change to engagement-based payouts — Epic's message to creators is clear: We need more players in Fortnite; bring them in, and you'll be rewarded.

What’s Working

One of the people riding the wave extremely well has been TheBoyDilly, who is also the CEO of GoodGamers. Combined, they are by far the most successful creator group.

The secrets to their success, besides owning one of the biggest legacy maps in Go Goated! Zone Wars, are down to several factors. First, it has built a large community of fans. When surveying the Discord channels of the top creators, Good Gamers comes up on top with a community of ~73k members, with prettyboy in second place with ~57k members. Second, it has diversified its map types. This is a relative rarity among the top creators as most of the other maps by creators like bullseye, pandvil, rvb, et al. are derivatives of the maps that made them popular in the first place. Good Gamers also operate Murder Mystery and Bed Wars, popular variety games on Fortnite. Not only that, they did this early on as the above two games were released in 2023.

They aren’t the only ones diversifying away though. One prolific creator, sundaycw, has tried 24 maps, all ranging in theme and gameplay before finding a hit with Octogame 2, a complete remake of Squid Game in Fortnite.

And when browsing the various maps the top creators are making, there is an attempt at trying to create new types of experiences to see what sticks. From Good Gamer’s Fashion Runway, a Dress to Impress clone, to Pandvil’s Zombies, a survival shooter, and Hive’s Block Party, a party platformer. There are creators willing to push the boundaries and not content to create practice maps or zone wars.

What about the “professional” developers or content creators who have entered the ecosystem? Studios like ex-Bungie founder Alex Seropian’s Look North World or YouTuber Typical Gamer’s Jogo Games? 

The difference between the two is stark, with a 272x difference in minutes played. And the key difference here (besides the fact that one of them is a successful YouTuber with more than 15M subscribers) is that Typical Gamer’s maps are all variations of what’s already popular — Red vs. Blue, Bedwars, Box PVP — leveraging on his understanding of the audience (and his considerable following) from his content creation. On the other hand, Look North World’s maps are all varied in theme and gameplay, an admirable effort at trying to create something different but perhaps not hitting the mark. What’s needed moving forward is likely a combination of both approaches, a keen understanding of what the audience wants now, plus a willingness to experiment to find the popular games of tomorrow — a strategy exemplified by Good Gamers.

Conclusion

If we look at the current state of Epic’s ambitious plan with Fortnite, it seems to have hit somewhat of a slump. Platform engagement has declined, only to be re-invigorated by its own first-party experiences, such as Fortnite Reload and OG. There is no rush of new audiences coming in to consume the creator-made islands. Instead, the onus is now on the creators themselves to bring in people to the party. And it may not be a bad strategy. Necessity breeds invention, and as we’ve seen in Roblox and Fortnite, the creators are nothing if not creative. It will be interesting to see how these creators tackle user acquisition.

While that’s the short-term view, what about Fortnite Creative’s long-term viability? Is it on the path to seriously challenge Roblox as a UGC leader? From our vantage point, it is making good progress but needs to desperately get its player base to play something other than Battle Royale. It's encumbered by the fact that it has to keep its shooter audience happy — they buy the battle passes and cosmetics that pay the bills — while trying to encourage exploration of new genres and games, which have yet to truly capture the hearts and minds of the player base. 

There’s also the engagement-based model payout, which has already seen some big changes, and will likely continue to see more. I believe we’ll see this evolve in two phases. The next phase will be to make payouts tied in with more monetization metrics, such as tracking purchases of the battle pass, customizations after engaging with an experience, or tracking the engagement of spenders in creator experiences like Highrise does. Then, the next step might be to allow creators to sell items for v-bucks, while adhering to Epic’s anti-pay-to-win principles. Either way, the engagement-based model as it is today will need to change to make the platform more viable for Epic and the creators.

The State of Modding and Overwolf

While there’s naturally a lot of eyes on the big two platforms, we mustn't forget that UGC has a strong and growing user base outside of them. We’ve split these UGC ecosystems into modding (for games that support either external tools, such as Overwolf’s Curseforge) and live services UGC (for games that provide UGC tools in-game, like Fall Guys).

Modding

The modding ecosystem has grown from strength to strength, as seen in the charts below from Matthew Ball of downloads growth from three platforms: CurseForge, Nexus Mods, and Mod.io. CurseForge is by far the largest platform, but all are growing meaningfully.

Modding has crossed the divide of being a “nice to have” to a “must have,” with many large franchises and titles having either released or announced official modding support.

Minecraft is the perennial king of mods and private servers, but what makes it tricky to size is that the modding community is split into either the Java or Bedrock edition. We cover the differences in this article, but in a nutshell, the Java edition is more open, allowing for more variety of mods but is PC-only. The Bedrock edition is for all platforms but more closed (no modification of core game mechanics), with everything going through the Minecraft Marketplace. On CurseForge, Minecraft Java is the dominant game, making up 66% of all mods and 88% of downloads on the platform. On the Bedrock side, everything goes through the Minecraft Marketplace. Microsoft has not released any creator payout figures since 2021, when it mentioned that “creators have generated over $350 million from more than 1B downloads of mods, add-ons, and other experiences in Minecraft” in its Q3 2021 earnings call. The marketplace has historically been limited to skins, textures, and maps, but in February 2024, Mojang introduced Add-Ons in the marketplace (they were available externally prior), which allowed the modification of game behavior (though still not to the level allowed by Java) and they have quickly become one of the most popular content types sold on the Marketplace. However, there was controversy in the Bedrock modding world when Mojang made a change to how Bedrock servers worked. While we won’t go into the details (check out this article for more information), the changes meant debugging and maintaining plugins on Bedrock servers would become very difficult. This sparked a request on the official Minecraft feedback site to reinstate the debugging capability that gained more than 14,000 upvotes and 1,000+ comments (it also hit the comment limit, automatically closing the post). This change also has many Bedrock server owners questioning the future and viability of Bedrock modding and private servers.

Starfield released its Creation Kit in June 2024, allowing users to create officially supported mods shared via its Creations website. Prior to this, it already had quite a healthy Nexus Mods presence, with 10,000 mods and 71M downloads.

Hogwarts Legacy also announced official PC modding support in January through CurseForge via Overwolf. As part of the announcement, a modding contest was announced with a total of $125,000 up for grabs.

inZoi, KRAFTON’s highly anticipated life sim, will feature official mod support through Overwolf’s CurseForge.

Kingdom Come Deliverance II, the breakout hit of 2025 so far with 2M copies sold in two weeks, recently announced official modding support through its X account.

Baldur’s Gate III has had a healthy mod community on Nexus Mods going all the way back to 2020 while the game was still in early access. But in September last year, it officially integrated mod support using Mod.io’s solution, resulting in a spike in peak CCUs lasting a month.

Stalker 2 technical producer Yevhenii Kulyk revealed that the game would support both PC and console mods in this interview with Radio Times Gaming. 

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2’s game director posted a message on the Focus Entertainment forums regarding modding, acknowledging how important the modding community is and that they would be releasing tools to the modders “so they can develop mods with greater ease.”

Grand Theft Auto VI will be one of the biggest launches of 2025 when it releases this fall, and according to Digiday, “Rockstar Games has been in discussions with top Roblox and Fortnite creators, as well as dedicated ‘GTA’ content creators, about the potential to create custom experiences inside the upcoming game”. As we covered last year, GTA has a robust and very active modding community centered around roleplaying servers. Rockstar also owns cfx.re, the team who operate FiveM and RedM, customized server solutions for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption. While we have no idea of the scope of Rockstar’s ambitions with custom experiences, this could be a potential game changer as big as Epic’s entry with Fortnite Creative. But as we’ve seen with Fortnite, shifting a game to a UGC platform is a monumental multi-year task, and even a team like Rockstar will face an uphill battle.

In all cases, the news of mod support has been met with overwhelmingly positive sentiment from the player base, underlining how important it is to fans to have the ability to create and consume these mods in an official way.

The Modding Ecosystem is Getting More Sophisticated

The rise of modding solutions like CurseForge (the world’s largest modding ecosystem), Nexus Mods (primarily a mod distribution hub), and Mod.io (which offers a comprehensive B2B-focused SDK) has opened up modding like never before. Having mods integrated in-game adds a level of confidence for more casual players that they are getting something safe and vetted that downloading an unknown ZIP or RAR file doesn’t.

There are more ways for creators to monetize. Where creators used to be limited to donations via PayPal or Patreon — or in some cases, charging for access or selling in-game content — now there are a plethora of monetization models. From CurseForge’s engagement-based rewards program (which has paid out more than $20M to mod authors in 2024) and Nexus Mods’ donation points system, to Mod.io’s Marketplace, a white-label UGC marketplace solution that allows games to enable creators to create and sell UGC items. All these platforms operate differently, and so far, CurseForge has best monetized modding at scale and offers the most comprehensive platform solution for AAA developers.

Besides the above, there are also premium mods (mods with paid access), which have been successfully trialed in CurseForge via Ark: Survival Ascended. This was announced in May 2023, though the first premium mods were only available in early 2024. We’ll cover this in more detail shortly. 

All of this has enabled a new era of “pro-modding”, where professional studios are beginning to build on top of other studio’s games. For example, Look North World, in partnership with Studio Wildcard, Hasbro, and Overwolf, built the Ark: Survival Ascended x Power Rangers mod. For more insight on where pro-modding is headed, check out our podcast featuring Overwolf, Studio Wildcard, and Look North World.

The State of Overwolf

Overwolf is the largest player in modding, so let’s break down the company’s progress in more detail. Over 2024, Overwolf’s modding platform, CurseForge, saw significant growth across all key metrics:

• Mod downloads reached 24B, up 60% YoY from 15B.
• Total playtime across the CurseForge ecosystem grew 43.23% YoY.
• New mod authors increased by 15.12% YoY, bringing the total to 142,743 creators.
• In 2024, Overwolf creator payouts (split across app creators, modders, website owners, and game server owners) totaled $240M — a 19% increase from the $201M distributed in 2023.

Overwolf's Creator Ecosystem

As noted above, in 2024, total payouts to creators amounted to $240M. Importantly, this figure includes more than just mod authors, who received $20M in payouts, according to the company. Overwolf supports four major types of in-game creators:

1. App Creators – Developing custom UI overlays, stat tracking tools, and real-time player resources for games like Diablo IV and League of Legends helping players improve their overall gameplay experience seamlessly.
2. Mod Authors – Bringing entirely new gameplay mechanics and content expansions to life.
3. Game Server Owners – Running custom in-game economies and roleplay communities, with servers like creating immersive social gaming experiences for tens of thousands of players.
4. Website Owners – Managing large-scale gaming hubs that provide critical resources like build guides, match statistics, and esports rankings. Sites like Maxroll.gg now attract millions of monthly users, helping players optimize their performance and stay engaged.

Website owners is a relatively new creator category that was unlocked by Overwolf’s eight-figure acquisition of NitroPay, which expanded their creator categories to include website owners and gaming publishers, and expanded its reach to more than 100M unique monthly gamers. NitroPay, now rebranded as Nitro, is a leading ad tech company specializing in helping gaming websites monetize traffic and maximize ad revenue.

New Revenue Streams: Premium Mods

CurseForge offers AAA game developers a comprehensive go-to-market strategy and content moderation framework to support thriving UGC ecosystems. The platform not only integrates modding tools but also ensures mods are ready at launch by working directly with creators and hosting creator hackathons. To uphold brand safety and content quality, CurseForge actively moderates UGC to ensure it aligns with studio guidelines. It also drives targeted marketing efforts — including user acquisition campaigns, influencer partnerships, and community events — to maximize reach and engagement. With a network of 140,000 mod authors, the platform connects studios with experienced creators, ensuring a consistent pipeline of creative, authentic content.

In terms of monetization, in 2024, CurseForge introduced Premium Mods, giving creators the ability to charge for access to their mods.

Launched in February 2024 in partnership with Studio Wildcard, Premium Mods debuted in ARK: Survival Ascended, offering high-quality, studio-backed content that transforms gameplay. Unlike traditional mods, these professionally developed, frequently updated mods bring new game modes, expansive maps, and gameplay enhancements — essentially a middle ground between full-scale DLCs and traditional free mods. 

Unlocking paid access to UGC experiences with high production quality enables creators to make a living from their creations. According to Overwolf, there have been 46 premium mods released, more than 500k premium mods purchased, and the top premium mods gross around $100K–$500K USD — driving seven figures of total revenue in just a few months. As an example, ARK: Survival Ascended mod author Sandi has earned six figures in just five months from his premium mod sales.

Major Studio Partnerships: the Future of UGC in AAA Games

In 2024, CurseForge for Studios expanded its partnerships with leading studios, pushing UGC into the AAA world.

In January 2025, Warner Bros. Games announced a partnership with CurseForge to introduce official PC modding support for Hogwarts Legacy through the Hogwarts Legacy Creator Kit, which supports modding new quests, dungeons, and character enhancements such as cosmetics and skins. The mods can then be submitted through the CurseForge platform to be published in the game. Since the launch in January 2025, there have been more than 1.5M mod downloads for Hogwarts Legacy.

Another major partnership was with KRAFTON to integrate an official mod program and repository into inZOI, its upcoming life-simulation game. The integration of a dedicated modding platform in CurseForge will give the inZOI community the tools and resources needed to bring their creative visions to life, reinforcing KRAFTON’s commitment to modding and user expression.

In June 2024, CurseForge and Hasbro announced a collaboration, bringing the iconic Power Rangers franchise into ARK: Survival Ascended. The ARK x POWER RANGERS premium mod, developed by Look North World, demonstrated how brands can engage directly with gaming communities through curated UGC experiences. Following its success, Hasbro and CurseForge expanded their collaboration in February 2025 with the launch of ARK x POWER RANGERS Wave 2, introducing even more custom skins, Zords, and weapons to enhance the Power Rangers experience in ARK.

Overwolf is clearly seeing real momentum in bringing the next era of mods to AAA games, and we’re optimistic that there will be many more exciting partnerships to discuss in the months and years to come. Overwolf is leading the pack, and we expect a rising tide will raise all ships.

Live Service UGC & Other Emerging Platforms

Party Games UGC: 1 Year Later

Last year, we covered several party games with integrated UGC tools — from the viral hit Eggy Party, the original party platformer Fall Guys, and the Tencent quick follow, Fun Party. Eggy Party saw a global launch in February 2024 and was released on the Switch in November 2024, while Fall Guys was released on mobile (Android only, unless you lived in the EU) via the Epic Games Store app. 

Fun Party launched with a bang, but it looks like it’s going out with a whimper.

Eggy Party also hasn’t had a great 2024, with both downloads (40M, -42% YoY) and revenue ($129M, -52% YoY) significantly down. Not only that, for both games, their figures are almost entirely coming from China, which makes up >96% of revenue and >75% of downloads for Eggy Party, while Fun Party is China-only. For a more western-centric game, we can look to Stumble Guys, which added Stumble Workshop in 2023, allowing players to create maps. It too has performed poorly, with revenue down by -67%.

Game	2024 Mobile Revenue	2024 Mobile Downloads
Eggy Party	$129M (-52% YoY)	40M (-42% YoY)
Fun Party*	$55M	14M
Stumble Guys	$24M (-67% YoY)	78M (-22% YoY)

What about Fall Guys and its creative mode? First thing to know is that the mobile version doesn’t support the level editor. Second, by looking at a combination of Google trends for the search term “fall guys creative” and search on various content platforms like YouTube and TikTok, the creative mode itself doesn’t seem to have taken off. Most of the videos you get when searching “fall guys creative” are from when it launched in 2023, and search interest in 2024 was minimal.

Why hasn’t the interest in UGC sustained within these games? It’s likely that UGC within the framework of party platforming games is limited. Players can essentially only create maps with limited means to create genuinely innovative gameplay, and this gets boring after a while. In fact, of the titles above, only Eggy Party really saw increased engagement due to the creator maps, and this was partly due to the popularity of “trap maps”, where seemingly innocent-looking levels were full of unexpected traps, making videos of them go viral. Once the hype and novelty wore off, the toolset did not allow creators to make truly new and engaging content, and we see the decline in interest.

Other UGC Platforms

There have been no lack of entrants to the UGC platform world, from Web3 pioneers like The Sandbox and Decentraland, mobile avatar social apps including Zepeto, PC-based platforms such as the Epic-funded Core, or the metaverse that’s sneaking under everyone’s radar, Highrise. So far, besides Highrise, none of them have gained significant traction, with Zepeto the most successful at 238M lifetime downloads (it was launched in 2019) but just $82M in revenue. The Sandbox recently completed its Alpha Season 4, which received about 581,000 unique players, while Decentraland is seeing only 500-600 DAUs, according to dcl-metrics.com, a Decentraland-created analytics site. 

Highrise is a mobile virtual world where players can create an avatar and join “rooms,” which are individual experiences that range in theme, design, and activities. Its impressive retention — with users logging in more than five times a day — is largely driven by the game's integration of social chat features, its follow system, and strong focus on outfit customization. Highrise recently passed $250M in lifetime revenue in June 2024, a milestone the company attributes to its in-game secondary market and sales of creator-made designs. In 2023, it paid out $444,000 to its 5,000 creators for an average of $88.80 per creator, putting it a little over half of Roblox’s $142.86 per creator. That said, it updated its economy model in 2024, and now uses a hybrid of engagement and virtual currency sales. It also updated its toolset, Highrise Studio, to make it easier for creators to make experiences and recently acquired Infinite Canvas, an AI-based UGC dev team. Highrise is unique in that it skews heavily female (70%) with an average age of 18-22.

Manticore, the team behind Core, seems to be pivoting away from its UGC platform, and is currently actively hiring to build an “a new immersive, open world combat-focused massively multiplayer online (MMO) game leveraging the power of its UGC platform, Core”. Based on the many “looking for talent to build an MMO” LinkedIn posts from its CTO, Christian Wilson, and the fact that Core’s most-played title, Island Survival Alpha (with 2M plays), was last updated in 2023, it’s clear the company has completely shifted priorities.

What about upcoming UGC platforms? Supercell-backed HypeHype has a cross-platform UGC app that soft-launched in the Philippines in 2021, Canada in 2023, and just recently in January opened up to more countries (Brazil, India, Vietnam, and more). It’s an incredibly polished experience (on mobile; it’s currently terrible on PC), and unlike Eggy Party and its ilk, HypeHype allows the creation of a large variety of experiences, such as Trials Obby and Grow a Monster! The in-game editor is also completely integrated with the main app and not an external tool like Roblox Studio or UEFN. This is one to look out for.

Yahaha is another emerging UGC platform, with dual headquarters in China and Finland, that was funded to the tune of $90M to build a “low code platform for metaverse games”. It also is a pioneer in AI, releasing an AI-powered 3D scene generator back in October 2023. Currently, it has four AI features: Ask Questions, Search Assets, Generate 3D Objects, and Generate 3D Scenes. The AI tools are meant to help with the cold start problem, which many other UGC platforms face by making it easier to develop experiences. 

Besides the AI tools, Yahaha encourages more creators by regularly running creator challenges with small cash prizes. The latest one, a 21-day horror challenge, has cash prizes from $100 to $200 for the top three creations. So far, traction is limited. One of the top experiences we could find, Hide-and-Seek, had only about 201k visits. Interestingly though, Yahaha publishes premium experiences created on its platform on Steam, such as a game called Only Out, and it also has a horror-only spinout, Yahaha Horror, that publishes on Itch.io. It’ll be hard to see how it can compete with the likes of Roblox and Fortnite, though the lean toward horror may see it become a niche player for fans of that genre.

Besides the companies we highlighted above, there are a ton of other startups and contenders seeking for success in UGC. From French startup Rivrs (cross-platform experience development) to Krafton’s Overdare (mobile UGC platform), and Pahdo Labs (anime virtual world with UGC), the world of UGC is incredibly exciting, and we look forward to seeing who we’ll be talking about next year.

Developer Payouts

Total developer payouts have grown healthily over the past year, with payouts from the largest platforms (Roblox, Fortnite, Overwolf/CurseForge) growing by +32% YoY and a CAGR of 21.64% from 2022.

However, competition is also heating up. Fortnite saw almost triple the number of creators in 2024 than 2023, and the Overwolf developer base also increased 7.9% year-over-year. While Roblox no longer makes the creator count public (it just vaguely refers to millions of creators), when we last compiled this report, we saw that it had 5.6M creators in total, and given the general growth of the platform, it is likely to also have grown significantly. If we assume 20% growth (a reasonable figure given it had also grown by 20% in 2023), that’s 6.7M creators, though the actual number that earn enough Robux to qualify for the DevEx program is only around 20,000.

Platform	2024 Developer Earnings	No. of Developers	Payouts Per Developer 2024
Fortnite	$325,000,000	70,000	$4,642.86 (-77% YoY)
Overwolf	$240,000,000	178,000	$1,348.31 (+11% YoY)
Roblox	$923,000,000	6,720,000*	$137.35 (-4% YoY)

*Naavik estimate

As we can see above, while total payouts have increased, only Overwolf saw average payouts increase, while the average developer on Fortnite and Roblox saw a decrease in revenue. This was particularly drastic for Fortnite, where the huge influx of creators in 2024 has meant a 77% drop in average revenue. It does, however, remain the platform with the highest average payout.

So should you be a UGC developer? According to Gamalytic, as of writing, Steam has 69,688 hobbyist and indie publishers (99.7% of publishers on Steam), and this cohort made $1.4B in revenue in 2024, giving us an average of $20,090 per publisher. While this makes it look like creating on Steam is much more revenue efficient, we must not forget that the toolset and pipeline of UGC platforms mean it is much quicker and cheaper to build a game on Roblox and Fortnite than to release a Steam game.

The low barrier of entry also means there are many more hobbyists and people doing it for fun, and Roblox has performed a survey that found that “having fun ranked 4x higher than monetisation”.  As a result, the majority of Roblox’s millions of creators don’t even reach the threshold of 30,000 Robux to even be eligible for a payout (a requirement for the DevEx program). For an apples to apples comparison, we can compare the number of creators that hit the minimum threshold of $100 in both Fortnite (20,625 creators) and Roblox (20,000 creators), giving us an average payout per creator of $15,757 for Fortnite and $46,150 for Roblox.

Add to that the opportunities for additional monetization avenues, such as in-game brand activations and ads (which Steam forbids), makes UGC still an attractive destination for aspiring developers, despite the low average payout.

Conclusion

If there’s one thread tying everything in the UGC world in 2024, it's accessibility. From new AI tools and new no-code platforms to more in-game integrations, it's never been easier to create and consume UGC. And looking forward, we see that while the games industry is still working out the best way to integrate generative AI into its pipelines, UGC is forging ahead with putting AI tools into its users’ hands. Given the speed of AI innovation, we’re not as far away from the “make game button” as we might think, and a UGC platform will probably bring it into the mass market. While the bleeding edge will still come from companies with huge AI training budgets, such as Microsoft (Muse) and Google (GameNGen), how these tools become as everyday as using Blender, Substance, or Photoshop will likely be driven by a UGC platform. 

When everyone can dream of the game they want to make and make it reality, what new experiences could we see? When hobbyist creators are no longer tied down by their lack of coding or artistic skills, this could result in a Cambrian explosion of new games and experiences like we’ve already seen in Roblox but on a much, much greater scale. The future of games leans heavily on UGC, and the future of UGC is in AI. 

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