Big thanks to Naavik contributors Francois Courset, Tim Shepherd, and Aaron Bush for writing – and to Brendon Stock and Mike Gubman of Chartis.gg, the largest creator network in UGC, for writing the Fortnite Creative section. To explore working with Naavik on your UGC games consulting needs (due diligence, strategy, and more), please contact us here. We’d love to chat!

We’ve long compared user-generated content (UGC) gaming to a snowball rolling down a mountain. Every year, as leading platform network effects expand, the snowball grows steadily larger. And every year, as UGC drives a larger percentage of industry-wide growth, the industry pays closer attention. 

This compounding effect continued over 2025. Across the top three ecosystems we measured (Roblox, Fortnite, and Overwolf), developer payouts were ~$2.2B in 2025, a +47% increase over 2024.

In this report, we cover all notable corners of the UGC games industry. Some highlights include:

• 2025 was another inflection point for Roblox. Games like Grow A Garden and Steal A Brainrot became the most played games in gaming history (measured by CCU). They also accelerated Roblox’s overall growth. DAUs and Bookings jumped 52% and 55% YoY, respectively – and Roblox now accounts for 3.4% of global gaming revenues. In network effect-driven industries, the winners tend to keep on winning. Roblox’s next couple of years may not replicate the explosive growth seen in 2025, but its growing advantages – from its social fabric and creator community to the billions it will spend collectively on R&D and CapEx – will keep on getting stronger.
• In contrast, Fortnite Creative is showing signs of maturity. The number of active creators has slightly fallen since 2024, although the number of maps published has more than doubled. Creator-made experiences have gained slight platform share (~40% today), and the platform is modestly expanding in genre diversity, but growth in engagement-based payouts has decelerated (up only an estimated +5% YoY). While creators must compete against Epic’s first-party games, Epic has been rolling out developer improvements and new ways to monetize (such as in-island transactions). Time will tell whether Fortnite can unlock new platform-wide growth and continue loosening constraints that currently hold back creators.
• Greater scale has brought heightened global scrutiny. As Roblox cements itself as a childhood staple, regulators worldwide are increasing pressure to ensure its child safety standards meet rising expectations. At the same time, brands are becoming more sophisticated — applying lessons from creator partnerships to refine how they show up and engage on the platform.
• Modding’s renaissance continues unabated. Leaders like CurseForge by Overwolf and Mod.io grew mod downloads 38% (to 33B) and 56% (to 920M), respectively. Overwolf’s payouts to developers ($300M, +25% YoY) are now nearly as high as Fortnite’s. This is all driven by underlying innovations in new business models (like premium mods), cross-play support, further embedding into games, and more robust ecosystems built around creators. Games like Minecraft remain tentpoles for mods and private servers, but popular games like Hogwarts Legacy, Palworld, and Monster Hunter Wilds are also seeing benefits in extending their longevity. 
• Many smaller companies have struggled due to the nature of network effects and the heavy technical investments required to compete. Beyond the largest platforms and ecosystems, there remains a long-tail of other UGC gaming efforts. However, no Web3-native UGC platform has achieved meaningful scale, and most mobile social/party UGC-driven games that showed promise in the past have all regressed. There are still opportunities, especially leveraging emerging technologies, but it’s become a tougher market to fundraise in.

Just like in last year’s report (and the year before that), we’ll break down all the details and data for you. As you read, keep in mind that UGC isn’t monolithic; each top platform is different from the others. Also, different aspects of UGC either disrupt the status quo (Roblox aggregating the next generation of gamers) or extend it (mods fortifying already successful games). However you slice it, UGC gaming is not slowing down.

The State of Roblox 2026

CEO David Baszucki previously announced that one of Roblox’s long-term goals is to capture 10% of the global gaming market revenue. Driven by multiple hit experiences and scaling operations across the board, the company drove material progress toward that goal over 2025.

While the broader gaming industry only modestly grew in 2025, Roblox effectively acted as one of the sector's primary engines. The platform commanded 3.4% of total gaming content spending (which tops 4.5% when excluding China, according to Matthew Ball). Even more striking: Roblox single-handedly accounted for two-thirds of the industry’s net, non-China consumer spending growth in 2025. 

Roblox’s metrics for the year are, by any standard, outstanding:

Metric	2024 (Actual)	2025 (Actual)	YoY Change
Annual Revenue	$3.6B	$4.9B	+36%
Annual Bookings	$4.4B	$6.8B	+55%
Hours Engaged	71B	124B	+75%
Avg. DAUs	332M	506M	+52%

Roblox further executed on its 2024 strategy of improved social play mechanics and distribution tools, and legacy titles like Brookhaven and Blox Fruits also remained stable anchors. However, it was the arrival of not one, but three, record-breaking oddball titles that delivered stellar growth and had the entire industry taking notice in 2025: Grow A Garden and Steal A Brainrot fundamentally changed the platform's scale in Q3, and 99 Nights in the Forest arrived shortly thereafter.

Momentum peaked in August 2025 when a cross-experience "Admin Abuse War" event between Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot pushed platform-wide concurrency (CCU) to a record 47.4M players, significantly outpacing the historical peaks of competing platforms like Fortnite and even Steam.

Of course, this kind of scale – especially when kids are involved – brings a heavy regulatory spotlight. While Roblox is no stranger to criticisms, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, as one example, emerged as a vocal critic, raising formal concerns over child safety and grooming. While Roblox has always invested in safety features (as there are always issues on any scaled social-driven platform), this rising pressure pushed Roblox to place this priority even more front and center.

This move coincided with broader market volatility throughout Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, most recently punctuated by the unveiling of Google’s world model prototype, Project Genie. As we noted at the time, the market reacted overzealously, but the skeptical sentiment impacted Roblox’s stock as well as other major players like Unity and Take-Two.

While the short-term stock price movements reflect broader sentiment trends, the underlying business itself, which we’ll cover next, remains high-performing with surging engagement. Roblox’s strategy for the coming year rests on four pillars:

• The 18–34 Demographic: Aggressively pursuing older users, who now represent a significant portion of engagement, through targeted platform technology
• AI Integration: Using generative tools to lower the creation barrier for developers and speed up development cycles
• Safety and Civility: Establishing world-class moderation as a core competitive moat rather than a regulatory burden
• Monetization and Advertising: Bolstering creator tooling and services to diversify revenue beyond core transactions

User Base Expansion and Engagement

Throughout 2025, engagement on Roblox – measured in total hours played – grew 88% from 19B hours in Q4 2024 to 36B hours in Q4 2025. To help put this scale into perspective, across Q3 and Q4 combined, Roblox clocked in 75B hours of engagement (~12.5B hours monthly). That is more than the time spent on Steam and PlayStation combined. This also compares to 96B hours of engagement on Netflix over the second half of 2025. Notably, Roblox’s engagement growth is materially higher than any of these comparisons.

In short, engagement on Roblox is now more than double the next closest gaming platform and nearing the engagement of the world's largest premium streaming service. Yet, its market capitalization of $50B remains a fraction of other leading entertainment giants given its lower average monetization.

The per-experience statistics are equally impressive. All three mega hits of last year (Grow A Garden, Steal A Brainrot, and 99 Nights in the Forest) saw more monthly engagement each than Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode. Even older titles like Brookhaven RP, a six-year-old roleplaying game, averaged more monthly hours than all of Fortnite Creative in 2025.

Daily Active Users (DAUs) ended Q4 2025 at 144M, a 69% YoY increase. While the U.S. and Canada saw solid 32% growth, the real story was the international footprint, which grew by 79%. While growth was most aggressive in the APAC region (+82% DAU and +103% hours played), the mature North American markets still posted a robust 41% increase in hours played.

As with any content-driven platform, the quality and excitement around Roblox’s experiences is ultimately what drives platform-wide growth. In previous years, steadier growth was more fragmented across many smaller games in popular genres like “Obby” (obstacle) and “Tycoon”, as well as a broader range of larger, established titles. 

In 2025, however, the explosion of engagement is largely attributable to the popularity and “rivalry” between mega-hits Grow A Garden and Steal A Brainrot.

Grow A Garden, a social gardening simulator released in March 2025, quickly became a phenomenon. It peaked at 21.3M CCU in June, becoming the “Most Concurrently Played Game Ever”, comfortably beating Fortnite’s previous records of 15.3M CCU. Shortly after, the meme-fueled Steal A Brainrot became the second game in history to cross the 20M CCU mark.

The two titles eventually played off of each other’s success during the "Admin Abuse War" in August: a “pseudo-friendly rivalry” in which the games’ operators pitted their respective audiences against one another to see who could get the highest CCU of all time. These attempts were coordinated around “Admin Abuse” events, a new style of live-ops on Roblox. In these events, game administrators enter the game and play with the configurations, dramatically adjusting stats of different features and gifting obscene amounts of content to lucky players. The community loved it. As these games competed for the top spot, the total Roblox platform hit a staggering 47.4M CCU – another world record. 

Grow A Garden “won” the Admin Abuse War event in August, with 22M CCU vs. Steal A Brainrot’s 20M. Steal A Brainrot eventually achieved 25.4M concurrent users in October 2025, claiming the title for “Most Concurrently Played Game Ever.” 

Both games’ audiences have since dwindled and have been superseded by other similarly meme-centric viral games like 99 Nights in the Forest and Escape Tsunami for Brainrots. Bigger picture, what’s impressive is that even when the virality from breakout games inevitably fades, Roblox is proving it can still largely retain those new players on its platform. In the end, these moments of acceleration are rising tides that raise many, many boats.

Retention and Aging Up

Once in the ecosystem, players stick around to discover more games, and on average they stay longer than players did in previous years. Comparing Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, we see an 8.7% increase in playtime per player. This is a result of more sophisticated live-ops, better discovery algorithms, and Roblox-specific game mechanics that incentivize longer sessions. 

This stickiness is also being driven by a notable demographic shift. For years, Roblox was viewed as a destination for children, but the Over-18 (O18) crowd is now a strategic vector for growth. Following the first phases of global mandatory age-checks, the verified data (so far) shows a maturing split:

Demographic	Share of user base
Under 13	35%
13-17	38%
18+	27%

As stated in the Q4 earnings call, the O18 cohort is growing at over 50% YoY, double the rate of the younger segments. This is a major win for the business, because adult users monetize 40% higher on average than younger players. Considering that Roblox still reaches fewer than 10% of 18–34-year-olds in the U.S. daily, the untapped market remains significant.

Roblox is no longer just "the largest platform for kids." It is successfully maturing alongside its audience, turning content diversity and viral cycles into a sustainable, multi-generational flywheel.

Monetization Expansion

Total annual bookings reached $6.8B in 2025, a 55% increase over the $4.4B recorded in 2024. This growth was underpinned by a massive expansion in the paying user base, with Average Monthly Unique Payers (MUP) nearly doubling to 36.7M by year-end. 

The geographic breakdown reveals a strategic trade-off between volume and efficiency. In the U.S. and Canada, which remains the platform's primary revenue anchor, bookings grew steadily alongside a 34% increase in payers. More importantly, the Average Bookings Per DAU (ABPDAU) in this region saw double-digit growth, proving that mature markets have yet to hit a ceiling in spending. 

As in previous years, audiences in the APAC region continued to swell – propelled by a 700% surge in Indonesia and 160% in Japan. While the influx of non- and low-spending users from these markets caused APAC’s overall ABPDAU to contract by 4%, acquiring and retaining these audiences for the long-term is more important than immediately monetizing them. The monetization will gradually follow.

To address these regional disparities, Roblox introduced Regional Pricing Optimization in late 2025. This allows developers to set custom price points for products based on local economies – a move aimed at stabilizing revenue in Southeast Asia and India, where standard Robux pricing was a significant barrier to entry.

U.S. user vs. Brazil Robux pricing | Source: Roblox

We’ve also seen varied adoption of the two major monetization initiatives forecasted in our last report:

The Shopify Integration (Physical Goods): This has become a high-status tool for top-tier studios. Developers are increasingly combining physical merchandise with exclusive in-game content. Pet Simulator 99 took a brazen approach, selling (dozens of) plushies for up to $250 each! While lucrative, the inclusion of powerful DLC codes along with the physical items drew "pay-to-win" criticism from the community. For most, the "phygital" model remains a tool for established IP rather than smaller developers.

Paid Access: The initiative allowing developers to charge real currency for game entry (offering a 50–70% revenue share on these premium games) has seen much softer adoption. Most developers still favor the F2P model to maximize reach. Currently, paid access is used primarily as a beta-testing gate, ensuring only the most committed users participate in early-stage development. Top Paid Access charts show minimal engagement as most creators default to F2P.

The Rise of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) 

One driver of 2025’s margin improvement was the increased push to lower cost distribution channels, particularly on mobile following the precedent set by the Epic v. Apple legal battles. As a web-first and cross-platform product, Roblox has always had diverse revenue streams. Our number-crunching based on annual reports and other available data estimates the split at roughly 50% mobile (~30-32% iOS, ~16-18% Android), ~15-20% console, and ~30-35% D2C. In 2025, increased D2C sales saved the company nearly $200M in platform fees. 

Roblox has continued to redirect mobile and console purchases toward its web platforms, if only to complete purchases and redeem gift cards. 

To incentivize this behavior, Roblox offers a 25% Robux bonus for web purchases and an additional 10% for subscribers. By ensuring the "best value for money" is only available outside of Apple and Google’s ecosystems, Roblox is increasingly training its user base to shop directly. 

Advertising

Advertising is also emerging as a structured revenue stream. While CFO Naveen Chopra characterized current ad revenue as "modest," the infrastructure scaled rapidly in 2025. Beyond portal ads (in which players can “jump” into rewarded ads from in-game portals), Roblox integrated new placements directly into the discovery feed and expanded partnerships with Amazon DSP, Magnite, and PubMatic. CPMs for ads are reportedly low, as creators have not widely implemented significant ad integration. The potential for ad revenue to scale is substantial, but creators must first identify and implement rewarded ad placements that are both valuable and enjoyable for users, which would then boost ad placement bidding activity.

Developer Payouts (DevEx)

Developer payouts on Roblox reached a landmark $1.5B in 2025, a 70% YoY increase. In Q4 alone, $477M was distributed to creators. Obviously, heightened engagement helped drive larger payouts, but additional boosts to the program included:

1. The DevEx Rate Hike: In September, Roblox increased the exchange rate from $0.0035 to $0.0038 per Earned Robux ($38 USD per 10,000 Robux). This 8.5% bump, while still smaller than other platform’s revenue splits, helps incentivize further creation and retain top-tier talent.
2. Creator Rewards: Roblox launched a new program that pays developers for "high-value behaviors" – such as session frequency and long-term retention – rather than just raw Robux sales.

The top 1,000 creators now earn an average of $1.3M annually (a 70% increase from 2024’s $735k average), and more than half of all spending growth is now occurring in experiences outside the Top 10.

Of course, just like there are power laws at play between UGC platforms, there are also strong power laws at play within Roblox. However, despite the large payouts (see image below, it's interesting to note that half of all revenue came from games made in 2025. This trend defies the "black hole games" reality we see elsewhere in the industry, in which the same biggest games on console/PC suck up most of the playtime year after year.

Creator Tools

Much of 2025’s Roblox Developer Conference centered on showcasing significant upgrades to the platform’s technology stack. Roblox’s annual investments into R&D surpassed $1.6B – while shrinking as a percentage of revenue – and were distributed across AI, infrastructure, and tooling. 

In 2025, the number of active developers on Roblox reached 3.5M, and the number of experiences maintaining over 1M MAU spiked to over 1,500 – a direct result of tooling empowering small teams to deliver bigger experiences.

Last year’s release of AI-powered Assistant for Roblox Creator Studio was met with a somewhat cool reception from the community, but it seems improvements have driven adoption and paved the way for even more exciting tools to come. 

AI

As mentioned earlier, the market volatility triggered by Google’s Project Genie initially spooked investors, but CEO David Baszucki used the opportunity to speak in more depth about Roblox’s own proprietary AI. He reiterated that Roblox’s vision for vibe coding is an extension of helping creators become even more capable and efficient; he noted that the next Grow A Garden will be “developed within a weekend.” 

Some core AI components released in 2025 include:

Cube: Cubeis a multi-modal 3D foundation model trained on over 12B hours of human interaction. Cube powers what Baszucki calls "4D Generation" (with the 4th D being “interactivity”). It generates 3D models that already contain the logic, physics, and interactivity schemas required to work instantly in-game.

Real-Time Dreaming: This allows creators to modify live worlds. For example, creators can prompt the Assistant to "lower gravity by 20% and make the lighting more moody," and the engine re-bakes the environment in milliseconds without requiring a re-publish.

400+ Specialized Models: Beyond world-building, Roblox now runs over 400 internal models for platform health. This includes automated PII (Personally Identifiable Information) classification in chat and real-time voice moderation in 28 languages.

Real-Time Voice Translation (coming “soon”): Building on the success of 2025’s text auto-translation (now supporting 17 languages), this tool will allow players to speak to one another in their native tongues with almost zero latency.

Beyond Generative AI: Professionalizing the Creator Stack

While AI features and vibe coding dominate the headlines, several less flashy updates are quietly professionalizing the platform's development ecosystem in 2026. 

Built-in A/B Testing and Segmentation: 2024’s proprietary analytics suite has finally been extended to include Experiments and Configs. Developers can now test everything from store pricing to difficulty curves in real-time, which is a notable step toward Roblox Creators being able to run mature live-ops comparable to leading mobile titles. 

Custom Matchmaking: Developers can now utilize "Text Chat Affinity" or "Custom Skill Attributes" to engineer socially compatible servers. This is beneficial for retention in PvP titles, as it allows for skill-based matchmaking that keeps games challenging without forcing players toward pay-to-win mechanics. It’s also another positive for child safety, as it enables keeping age-range cohorts in separate, verified environments.

Safety Analytics Dashboard: To support these efforts, a new "toxicity heat map" provides developers with an overview of their game’s social health. It pinpoints exactly where in an experience players are most likely to report abuse or drop off due to bad behavior, allowing for surgical fixes rather than blanket bans.

Performance on Every Device

As Roblox’s demographic shifts, its technical debt has become a strategic priority. The surge of users in regions like Indonesia and Brazil brings a specific challenge: these players primarily use mid- and lower-end Android devices. Stated at RDC2024, Roblox has been chasing a technical vision: "100-player open worlds that remain performant on a 2GB RAM device."

The platform remains mobile-first, with 80% of users playing on phones (compared to 17% on desktop and 3% on console/VR). However, these aren't isolated silos; Newzoo reports only 24% of Roblox users are mobile-only, with the vast majority switching between platforms frequently.

Bridging the Gap to AAA

While Roblox is so far successfully retaining its aging audience without fully losing them to other platforms, older audiences still desire experiences not provided by the platform. This includes genres that are dominant on other platforms like AAA shooters, RPGs, and sports-action titles. To capture the high-monetizing potential of the O18 demographic, Roblox is prioritizing the development of "Novel Games" – titles that utilize different gameplay mechanics and a higher visual fidelity than the "classic" Roblox aesthetic.

FRONTLINES, for example, is one of the best known “next gen” Roblox experiences, but metrics remain very modest when compared to the top 100 (or even top 1,000) “classic” Roblox experiences. This is clearly an upgrade when compared to classic Roblox graphics, but there’s a way to go to compete with other AAA titles that create aesthetics that much of the O18 audience appreciates.

To reconcile this content with low-end hardware, three architectural updates were deployed in late 2025:

• SLIM (Scalable Lightweight Interactive Models): These models optimize physics calculations and LODs, reducing the burden on the CPU and enabling longer sessions on mid-tier hardware.
• Server Authority: By moving logic to the server, Roblox has enabled the prediction and rollback technology necessary for competitive, low-latency shooters and sports games.
• Texture Streaming: By loading only the textures within a player’s immediate field of vision, Roblox has significantly reduced "time to join" and prevented memory-related crashes on older devices.

Roblox’s developer release notes regularly list various other technical improvements targeting production value and performance optimizations. 

Discovery

In 2025, Roblox placed heavy emphasis on expanding the reach of its discovery systems so players could find more experiences beyond their favorites. The company states that its “mission [of discovery] is to connect every user with the best creation and community for them.” Roblox has rolled out refinements to its recommendation and discovery algorithms to support creator growth and broaden player engagement.

Roblox additionally expanded the “Recommended For You” algorithm and gave creators analytics access to better understand what drives discovery signals. New discovery placements on Home and dynamic ranking were launched, with the explicit intention of increasing the visibility of more content.The Q4 shareholder letter states that the average user engaged with ~24 unique experiences per month in 2025, which is up 15% from ~21 in 2024. This suggests the "Recommended For You" algorithm has better matched games to players who would be interested in them.

Despite these technical refinements, 2025 demonstrated that the primary engine of massive success on Roblox remains word-of-mouth virality. Unprecedented growth from titles such as Grow a Garden, Steal A Brainrot, and 99 Nights in the Forest is led by YouTube and TikTok influencers, where a single video can catapult an experience to millions of concurrent users. 

Developers understand that while they cannot manufacture virality, they can maximize the potential for it by focusing on community management and “TikTokable gameplay.” SpyderSammy, the lead developer of Steal A Brainrot, became a community icon not just by making a game but by hosting the "Admin Abuse" events we covered earlier. By creating unscripted, "meme-able" moments that influencers are desperate to film, developers are essentially building their own marketing funnels through Discord and YouTube.

The Arrival of Professional User Acquisition

For studios that don’t want to wait for the lightning of virality to strike, the updated Ads Manager is becoming a professionalized tool for paid acquisition. 

By late 2025, a UI overhaul and more efficient bidding led to a 40% reduction in Cost Per Play (CPP) compared to 2024. Official guidelines set benchmarks for its three distinct campaign objectives, with anecdotal forum posts indicating degrees of variability.

Objective	Avg Cost Per Play (CPP)
Maximize plays	$0.008
Drive retention	$0.007
Reactivate users	$0.011

$R100 (Robux) = ~$1.25 USD, depending on membership method | Source: Roblox

At RDC 2025, Baszucki noted that 45K creators are using Ad Manager – a 70% YoY increase. Most developers use paid ads as a jump-start to trigger the organic recommendation algorithm, rather than as a continuous reinvestment strategy. However, as the platform becomes more crowded, it is only a matter of time before more hyper-competitive UA becomes the standard practice on Roblox.

Roblox Moments: Reclaiming the "Trillion Views"

While Roblox-related content has surpassed one trillion views on YouTube, that engagement naturally happens away from Roblox’s control. Moments is a TikTok-style feed that allows users to capture 30-second clips, edit them with licensed music via a new DistroKid integration, and share them instantly – all within the Roblox platform.

A frictionless "JOIN" button on every clip allows users to transition from watching a viral stunt to playing it in under three seconds. This unlocks a fun new discovery feed for players. This could be fine-tuned to individuals’ preferences, combined with sponsored and trending content. Moments is in beta, so not much is known about how it currently performs. 

The State of Brands on Roblox

Continuing the trend we saw in 2024, brands have continued to abandon the "digital real estate" model – building standalone, persistent worlds that often struggled to maintain a player base – in favor of high-impact integrations within existing hits.

The top 10 brand integrations into pre-existing games generated twice the impressions of the top 10 standalone brand games. As Gamefam CEO Joe Ferencz noted, "The way to win is to fish where the fish are, not by trying to dig your own ponds." For most brands, the most efficient path to scale is a "takeover" or collaboration with an experience that already has millions of DAUs.

While a few major IPs like Sonic Speed Simulator (which became the first branded game to cross 1B visits) and SpongeBob Tower Defense continue to thrive as standalone destinations, they are the exception. Of the 225 branded experiences tracked by RoMonitorStats in late 2025, those released in the latter half of the year struggled to break into the top tiers of engagement.

Instead, the tentpole moments of 2025 were defined by innovative integrations:

• Entertainment: Seven of the top 10 U.S. domestic films activated on Roblox. Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth hit 2B impressions, while the Wicked: For Good campaign across titles like Brookhaven delivered a staggering 8B impressions.
• Music and Culture: Bruno Mars hosted a near-record-breaking virtual concert in Steal A Brainrot (only outpaced slightly by Fortnite’s Remix Event featuring Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and Juice WRLD in 2024). Lady Gaga hosted a virtual meet and greet in Dress To Impress. 
• Toys: Toy-themed brand activations were launched across multiple experiences including Lego, Hot Wheels, UNO, Masters of the Universe, Polly Pocket, Monster High, and Barbie.
• Food: McDonald’s Happy Meal campaigns partnered with Adopt Me! and Pet Simulator where codes from Happy Meal toys unlocked exclusive in-game pets/items.

Financial Services: Even non-endemic brands like H&R Block participated. Immersive mini-games were used to subtly teach the tax implications of in-game earnings.

Taming the IP Wild West

The biggest structural change for IP in 2026 is Roblox’s self-serve IP licensing system. Previously, licensing a major franchise required months of legal negotiation reserved for top-tier studios. The new "License Manager" has democratized this, allowing any creator to browse a catalog of IPs from partners like Netflix, Lionsgate, Sega, and Kodansha.

Creators can now submit pitches directly for properties like Squid Game or Blue Lock, with standardized 10–25% revenue share models. This has two major impacts:

1. Legitimizing Inspiration: It allows developers of "fan games" to move from unauthorized usage to official, revenue-sharing partnerships.
2. Quality Control: IP holders maintain strict "Content Standards," with the ability to terminate licenses if the implementation doesn't meet brand guidelines.

Safety and Governance

While 2025 was a massive year for growth, more visibility brought a much tougher level of scrutiny. Following a series of highly publicized analyses, criticisms, and negative PR, more governments began taking a closer look at how Roblox handles safety. 

Between state-level lawsuits and multiple national inquiries, the company had to transition from its standard safety updates to a more aggressive, top-down overhaul of its policies.

The "Schlep" Incident 

One significant blow to Roblox’s reputation in 2025 was the "Schlep Controversy." In August, the platform issued an IP ban against a developer known as Schlep, who had gained notoriety for publicly exposing predatory behavior and security vulnerabilities. The move backfired. Critics accused the company of silencing whistleblowers to protect its public image rather than addressing the underlying risks. This led to high-profile creator departures and an immediate 11% drop in its stock price. More importantly, it catalyzed a lawsuit alleging that Roblox had actively suppressed evidence of its safety shortcomings – a legal liability that remains a cloud over the company entering 2026.

Wave of Repercussions

As controversies stacked up, a wave of international regulatory actions was triggered:

• Qatar: In August 2025, the nation blocked the platform entirely, citing a lack of adequate child protection measures.
• Brazil: Authorities forced Roblox to disable voice chat functionality nationwide, citing an inability to moderate real-time toxic communications. An additional loot box ban is coming to Brazil in March, with Roblox often cited as part of the reasoning.
• United States: State-level pressure escalated with Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill suing the company, followed by similar actions in Kentucky and Texas. These suits focused on alleged non-compliance with the Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC).
• Australia and New Zealand: Roblox is subject to strict age verification enforcement under new social media regulation.
• EU and UK: Regulators across the region have ongoing investigations into Roblox. Upcoming DSA and DFA regulation would enforce stricter rules on age verification, chat functionality, and monetization mechanics (i.e. loot boxes).

Trust and Safety as a Moat 

In response to these pressures, the platform shifted away from self-reported age data and mandated global age-verification checks – utilizing facial age estimation technology – for any user wishing to access chat. To get in front of further legislation, Roblox has taken the unusual step of open-sourcing its internal safety tools:

• Roblox Sentinel: A model designed for real-time detection of child endangerment.
• PII Classifier: An automated system that identifies attempts to solicit personal information during gameplay.

Furthermore, a total overhaul of the parental control suite now allows for more granular control over spend limits and content maturity settings.

We should expect to see continued scrutiny as new safety measures are evaluated for efficacy. In the long-run, however, by setting high standards in Trust and Safety, Roblox is likely to establish a large defensive moat that will be tough for smaller competitors to match. Regulation often helps the most dominant companies entrench their positions, and there’s little reason to think that’ll be different here.

Conclusion

2025 was a rollercoaster year defined by record-breaking scale, operational maturity, and public critique. Roblox’s hypergrowth was propelled by a new generation of viral hits, plus more sophisticated design, live-ops, and monetization tools to keep players engaged longer and spending more. At the same time, the company matched this creative surge with massive technical investments and upgrades. Roblox demonstrated that while viral content can drive audience expansion, it also has the infrastructure and network to support and retain them. While the platform faced significant public criticism, it met the challenge with a proactive safety overhaul, establishing mandatory age-checks and advanced AI moderation that shifted the narrative from reactive damage control to a visible, high-standard progress plan.

Management has set ambitious bookings growth targets of 22–26%, with a continued long-term goal of capturing 10% of the global gaming content spending. Despite its success, the platform is still brimming with untapped potential as in-game advertising, the user acquisition ecosystem, and live-ops expertise all have abundant room to improve. The impact of AI has only just begun, and other features like Moments could help take Roblox in new directions. Since the timing of the next massive viral hit is unpredictable, we shouldn’t expect the same growth as in 2025 – or for Roblox’s growth to move in a straight line. However, Roblox is positioned to continue compounding into a truly dominant and disruptive gaming platform.

The State of Fortnite Creative

Last year’s report described a Fortnite Creative ecosystem in hyper-growth mode. The creator count tripled from 24,000 in 2023 to about 70,000 in 2024. Epic launched Creator Economy 2.0, introduced UEFN as a real development environment, and rode the December 2023 Big Bang event to a surge of new players. The engagement numbers looked promising: 5.23B hours in creator-made islands, constituting 36.5% of all Fortnite playtime and $352M paid out to creators, up 11% YoY.

We also flagged warning signs. None of the top 10 Fortnite Creative experiences were new – all dated back at least 18 months – compared to five out of 10 new games on Roblox. The July 2024 payout formula pivot toward user acquisition weighting compressed earnings for entrenched creators, with some reporting 30–50% drops. The overall Fortnite flywheel still depended heavily on Epic’s own tentpole events to sustain baseline engagement.

Twelve months later, the hyper-growth story is over. What has replaced it is more interesting and complicated. In December 2025, Ferin’s “Steal the Brainrot” became the first creator-made island to surpass Epic’s own Battle Royale on key weekends, reaching over 1M concurrent users (no creator island previously crossed that threshold). That single data point rewrites the discovery narrative from last year’s report. Breakout is possible, though the path to success looks nothing like what anyone expected.

By the Numbers: A Maturing Ecosystem

In 2025, Fortnite Creative’s creator count effectively plateaued at around 70,000, nearly unchanged from the figure Epic reported for 2024. The content library tells a different story: the total number of published maps has surged from roughly 198,000 at the end of 2024 to ~488,000 by early 2026, according to ecosystem tracker data. That is a 2.5x increase in content volume against a flat creator base. To put the cumulative scale in perspective, in September 2025 Epic reported that players had logged over 11.2B hours across 260,000 live creator-made islands since UEFN’s launch. The total underscores the volume of engagement the creator ecosystem has absorbed.

The average creator is now publishing more maps than a year ago. Some of this reflects genuine experimentation with genre pivots, seasonal variants, and rapid prototypes enabled by improved UEFN tooling. Others have built breakout hits in newer genres: Octo Game 2 adapted the Squid Game formula into a persistent elimination format, while Fortophobia carved out the horror-survival niche. A significant share of the map growth, however, reflects cloning and trend-chasing. The ecosystem tracker data shows substantial duplication around proven formats. Some of it is simply the artifact of maps persisting indefinitely even when their creators have moved on.

The constraint on Fortnite Creative is no longer limited content. Instead, it is discovery and differentiation in a crowded ecosystem. With nearly half a million maps competing for attention, the gap between having a published island and having a played island has never been wider.

Metric	2023	2024	Early 2026
Active Creators	~24,000	~70,000	~69,000
Published Maps	N/A	~198,000	~488,000
Maps per Creator	N/A	~2.8	~7.1
Creator Playtime Share	~31%	36.5%	~40% (modeled)

Sources: Epic Games 2024 Year in Review (official); early 2026 figures from ecosystem trackers and author modeling. The 2023 playtime share is estimated based on pre-Big Bang engagement patterns.

Engagement and Playtime Mix

In 2024, players spent 5.23B hours in creator-made islands – 36.5% of all Fortnite playtime, up five percentage points YoY. That share has continued to creep upward, and we model it at ~40% by early 2026, driven primarily by incremental gains in non-combat genres and the expanding LEGO Fortnite creator ecosystem rather than any single breakout title.

The engagement picture is more nuanced. After the Big Bang event in December 2023 sent concurrent users soaring, baseline CCUs fell back toward pre-event levels through mid-2024 and have since oscillated around those levels. Fortnite’s all-time CCU record – over 14.3M concurrent players, set during the Remix: The Finale event in November 2024 – came from Epic’s own events, not creator content. Late 2025 upended that pattern. Ferin’s “Steal the Brainrot” crossed one million CCU in December 2025 and became the number-one game on Fortnite on key weekends, surpassing Epic’s own Battle Royale. For the first time, creator content was not just sustaining the floor but competing for the ceiling.

For creators, this means the total addressable playtime is growing slowly, if at all. Creator share of a roughly stable pie is increasing, which is a real win for independent creators but not the same thing as riding a wave of rapid overall platform growth the way Roblox creators experienced in 2021–2023.

Payouts and Economic Scale

Epic paid $352M in engagement-based payouts to creators in 2024. By September 2025, when Epic announced its in-island transactions initiative, the cumulative payout since UEFN’s launch had reached $722M, with seven individuals earning more than $10M each. Based on the cumulative figure and the observed cadence of payments, we model 2025 engagement payouts in the $350–390M range, with $370M as a reasonable midpoint.

Roblox, by comparison, paid $923M to developers in 2024 and exceeded $1B in the first nine months of 2025. Fortnite’s payout pool is ~40% of Roblox’s in absolute terms, though the per-creator math looks very different. Fortnite’s roughly $5,000 average annual payout per creator is ~35x higher than Roblox’s (despite differing technical definitions of “active” creators and payout structures), reflecting both a smaller creator base and a more concentrated distribution of earnings.

It’s also important to remember that the engagement payout pool is now only one of three revenue channels available to creators. In-island transactions (launched December 2025) and Sponsored Row ad revenue (launched November 2025) have opened two entirely new economic layers. The 2026 story is not just about how the engagement pool is sliced; it is about whether creators can stack multiple revenue streams the way mobile studios do.

Payout Distribution and the Emerging Creator Classes

The distribution of Fortnite Creative earnings follows a steep power law, steeper than most mobile app stores. Epic’s 2024 Year in Review data provides the clearest picture to date:

Earnings Band	Creators (2024)	% of Total	2025 Modeled
$1M	58	0.08%	~60–70
$100K–$1M	360	0.5%	~380–420
$10K–$100K	~1,310	1.9%	~1,400–1,600
$1K–$10K	~3,000–5,000*	~5–7%	Stable
Under $1K	~62,000	~90%	Stable

Sources: Epic Games 2024 Year in Review (1,728 creators at $10K, 418 at $100K, 58 at $1M). Lower bands are author estimates to reconcile with the ~70,000 total creator count. The $1K–$10K band is marked with an asterisk because Epic did not disclose this tier directly. 2025 modeled shifts assume modest mid-tier thickening driven by improved tooling, the new UA-weighted formula rewarding a slightly broader set of sophisticated creators, and early in-island transaction revenue.

Three distinct creator classes have emerged from this distribution:

• The Studio Layer (fewer than ~100 creators): These are professional operations like Pandvil, whose founder earned nearly $20.4M through 2024 by running multiple islands, employing full-time designers, managing analytics pipelines, and investing in off-platform user acquisition. They capture most of the engagement pool and are best positioned to take advantage of in-island transactions.
• The Middle Class (~400–1,600 creators): Earning between $10,000 and $1M annually, these creators represent the most important segment for a ecosystem health. They are large enough to treat Fortnite as a serious business but small enough to be existentially sensitive to formula changes. The 2024 UA-weighted formula shift hit many of them hardest. The slight thickening of this band in 2025 is encouraging but not yet transformative.
• The Long Tail (~62,000 creators): The vast majority of Fortnite’s creator base earns less than $1,000 per year. They provide the creative diversity that makes the ecosystem interesting but need better tooling, support, and likely growth at a platform level to grow from hobbyist to full-time professionals.

2025 and early 2026 are not democratizing the money so much as thickening the middle. The long tail remains extremely long, but there is just enough upward mobility to justify treating Fortnite Creative as a genuine career path for those capable of operating at studio standards.

The Formula Wars and the UA Imperative

Minutes Played to Engagement Score

Fortnite’s payout formula has gone through two distinct eras in rapid succession. When Creator Economy 2.0 launched in 2023, time played primarily drove payouts, with modifiers for popularity and retention. This rewarded creators who could sustain large, engaged audiences, a relatively straightforward incentive.

The July 2024 pivot changed the game. Epic restructured the formula to heavily weight new-player acquisition and lapsed-player re-engagement. Islands that could demonstrate they were bringing fresh users into Fortnite – not just entertaining existing ones – earned more. Islands coasting on a stable, recurring audience saw their payouts compress, in some cases by 30–50%.

The outcome was jarring for many creators. Some entrenched, high-performing islands dropped precipitously in earnings despite maintaining similar engagement metrics. Meanwhile, islands with strong off-platform funnels (social media presence, influencer partnerships, IP tie-ins) found themselves earning above their raw playtime contribution. The number of seven-figure earners actually declined between 2023 and 2024, suggesting that even top-tier creators felt the shift.

The Discovery Problem

The payout formula does not exist in isolation. It interacts with Discover, Fortnite’s content recommendation surface, in ways that compound the competitive pressure on creators.

Last year’s report surfaced one of the most damning data points in the ecosystem: zero out of the top 10 Fortnite Creative experiences had been created in the prior 18 months. That statistic illustrated a fundamental ossification problem: entrenched islands were capturing all of the organic discovery real estate, leaving new creators with no viable path to breakout visibility through Discover alone.

The late-2025 rise of “Steal the Brainrot” complicates this narrative in an important way: a new creator island did break through, reaching the #1 position and surpassing Battle Royale on key weekends. Brainrot’s success, however, drew its power from the mass market viral popularity of Brainrot on TikTok and massive off-platform social media amplification through the rise of “clipping” – precisely the kind of external UA that the revised Epic payout formula rewards. Epic has not fixed Discover’s organic algorithm, but a sufficiently powerful external signal can overwhelm the algorithm’s incumbency bias.

Epic has acknowledged this problem and is taking steps to improve. Discover’s algorithm now incorporates innovation signals: islands using advanced UEFN features, novel mechanics, or unique genre blends receive modest visibility boosts. Epic added a “Not Interested” button to let players signal genre preferences. Additionally, the New Content Testing system guarantees a baseline of impressions for freshly published islands, creating at least a theoretical path for new content to surface.

The structural dynamics remain challenging. The addition of public-facing CCU counts to island pages creates a cold-start problem. Players are less likely to try an island showing zero concurrent users. The copycat economy thrives because the algorithm still rewards engagement velocity, which clone maps can capture by riding the coattails of trending formats before the original creator can respond. First-party Epic experiences continue to dominate the most prominent Discover rows, further squeezing organic visibility.

What the System Now Incentivizes

The UA-weighted formula and algorithmic discovery together produce design and business incentives that closely resemble the mobile free-to-play economy of 2015–2018:

• User acquisition is now a first-class skill. Islands built to pull in new players (through social media campaigns, influencer partnerships, IP hooks, or Sponsored Row bids) can over-earn relative to their raw playtime.
• Retention tooling is catching up but still limited. Fortnite still lacks native long-term progression systems that Roblox takes for granted. Verse Persistence helps, but building durable retention loops requires more engineering effort than on Roblox.
• Monetization-adjacent engagement matters. Epic’s formula reportedly weights engagement from users who subsequently make purchases in the Fortnite item shop. Creators who attract spenders – even if those purchases happen outside the creator’s island – earn higher payouts.
• Coasting is punished. The days of publishing a solid map, accumulating a loyal audience, and collecting passive income are fading. The formula demands continuous growth, live-ops teams, and content refresh cadences, not just maintenance.

Roblox is converging on a similar incentive structure. In July 2025, Roblox replaced its legacy Engagement-Based Payouts with Creator Rewards, a two-part system that pays creators per “active spender” (five Robux per qualifying user per day) and offers a 35% share of the first $100 spent by new or returning users a creator brings to the platform. The Audience Expansion Reward, while a smaller payout component on Roblox, mirrors Fortnite’s UA-weighted formula. Both platforms are now explicitly paying creators to function as UA channels, not just content providers. The convergence is not coincidental; both Epic and Roblox are responding to the same structural reality that organic discovery alone will not sustain platform growth. Ultimately, new hit games that attract new players are also what grows these platforms.

All in all, running a leading Fortnite island in 2026 feels substantially closer to operating a live-service mobile game than to publishing a map in 2019 Creative. Serious creators today need growth managers, analytics pipelines, and marketing budgets as much as they need level designers.

In-Island Transactions: The Commerce Inflection

If the payout formula evolution was the story of 2024, in-island transactions are the story of 2025–2026. They represent the most consequential structural change to Fortnite’s creator economy since Creator Economy 2.0 launched in 2023.

What Launched and When

In September 2025, Epic announced that Fortnite developers would soon be able to create and sell items directly within their islands using new UEFN tools and a Verse-based API. Developer tools entered preview in UEFN on November 11, 2025. Full publishing capability went live on January 9, 2026. Creators can now sell durable items (persistent purchases), consumable items (items that deplete with use), and items with gameplay effects, including visual overlaps with approved Fortnite cosmetics.

The revenue share terms are aggressive to spur creator adoption. From December 2025 through January 31, 2027, creators receive 100% of the V-Bucks value from in-island sales. After platform fees (Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft), this translates to ~74% of retail revenue, well above Roblox’s 25% developer share. Beginning February 2027, the rate drops to 50% of the V-Bucks value (roughly 37% of retail revenue), which still exceeds Roblox’s standard payout. Epic stated that the eventual 50% rate is necessary to cover server hosting, safety, moderation, R&D, and other operating expenses.

Sponsored Row and Paid Discovery

Alongside in-island transactions, Epic launched the Sponsored Row in Discover on November 24, 2025. It is an auction-based system that lets creators and brands bid for prominent placement in a dedicated row within the Discover UI. Campaign management tools went live in November, enabling creators to set budgets, monitor spend, and track performance directly in the Creator Portal.

The system is very rudimentary compared to mature Real-Time Bidding systems in mobile and web advertising environments. Higher bids are prioritized and appear earlier in the day. Once an island wins the auction, the system delivers impressions in daily bursts until the daily budget runs out. All organic Discover rows remain unchanged; Sponsored Row is additive, not a replacement.

Through the end of 2026, 100% of Sponsored Row revenue feeds back into the engagement payout pool, effectively increasing the total payout available to all creators. After 2026, that rate drops to 50%. This creates an interesting flywheel: creators spending on Sponsored Row to boost their own islands are simultaneously boosting the pool that pays everyone else.

Creator Communities

The third leg of Epic’s late-2025 creator economy push is Fortnite Communities, which launched to players in December 2025. This feature gives creators native tools to build social channels, publish posts, and share updates directly within Fortnite and on fortnite.com. Creator posts surface across island lobbies, island pages, creator pages, and a new dedicated row in Discover.

The feature addresses a gap that last year’s report flagged: Fortnite lacked native community engagement and retention tools that Roblox provided out of the box. Creators had to rely entirely on external platforms (Discord, TikTok, YouTube) to maintain relationships with their player bases. Communities does not yet match the depth of Roblox’s social infrastructure, but it represents a step toward giving creators ownership of their audience relationship within the platform itself.

The Three-Revenue-Stream Model

These three launches (in-island transactions, Sponsored Row, and Communities) represent a structural shift in how Fortnite Creative’s economics work. Serious creators now have access to three distinct revenue channels:

Revenue Stream	Mechanism	Creator Share	Status
Engagement Payouts	Pool-based, formula-driven	Variable (pool share)	Live since 2023
In-Island Transactions	Direct item sales (V-Bucks)	100% → 50% of V-Bucks	Live since Jan 2026
Sponsored Row	Auction-based paid discovery	N/A (expense, not revenue)	Live since Nov 2025

This multi-channel model moves Fortnite closer to the economics of a traditional app store or game platform. Creators who can combine strong engagement (driving pool payouts), compelling item design (driving direct sales), and smart paid acquisition (Sponsored Row) could build revenue bases well beyond what engagement payouts alone could deliver. Whether the creator base, most of whom are level designers and game developers rather than commerce operators, can develop the skills and infrastructure to exploit these new channels remains to be seen.

Brand Activations: The Marketing Channel Matures

The commerce story extends beyond creator-to-player transactions. Like Roblox, Fortnite has become one of the most active brand activation platforms in gaming, and the data from GEEIQ’s State of Brands in Virtual Worlds reports quantifies just how quickly this channel is maturing.According to GEEIQ’s Fortnite-specific tracking, brand-owned experiences on the platform grew from just 11 in 2020 to 231 in 2024, a twenty-fold increase in four years. Integrations, which barely existed before 2023 (only two in 2022), surged to 45 in 2024. Between 2023 and 2024, total Fortnite brand activations (owned plus integrations) jumped from 136 to 276, roughly doubling year over year. Across all UGC platforms, 558 brands entered gaming in 2024, with Roblox and Fortnite together accounting for 88% of all tracked brand activations in 2025.

The format shift is more telling. In 2025, the balance flipped on Fortnite (just like on Roblox): owned experiences fell to 75 (down 68% from 231 in 2024), while integrations climbed to 65 (up 44% from 45), nearly reaching parity. Across all UGC platforms, integrations (335) formally surpassed brand-owned worlds (252) for the first time. Brand integrations on Fortnite have grown at an average of 32% quarter-over-quarter since early 2024. As GEEIQ CEO Charles Hambro noted, brands are moving away from standalone destinations and instead plugging into existing creator-built communities where scale and engagement are already proven.

The range of brands now integrating into Fortnite creator islands shows how mainstream this channel has become. The Dallas Cowboys embedded activations within popular islands launched to reach Fortnite’s young male demographic. Respawn Gum ran integrations tied to gameplay mechanics. A string of major film premieres – One Battle After Another, Weapons, and Sinners among others – debuted promotional content inside popular Fortnite games throughout the year, treating creator islands as a media channel alongside traditional digital advertising. According to GEEIQ’s tracking, the top three industries activating on Fortnite in 2025 – Media & Entertainment, Food & Drink, and Sports – reflect the platform’s broadening appeal beyond endemic gaming brands, with newcomers including Mentos, Mattel, and Universal Pictures.

Nike’s Airphoria activation illustrates the tension between custom brand experiences and integrations. According to GEEIQ data, Nike’s custom Fortnite island drew an impressive 22,300 average concurrent players on launch day, a strong debut by any measure. By day seven, that number had dropped to 2,200 CCU, a typical 90% decline that mirrors the engagement decay curve of most brand activations. That decay pattern is why the industry is shifting from one-off branded worlds (which cost $300,000–$500,000 to build, according to marketers) toward integrations into established islands with built-in retention. Brands now average 1.8 activations per brand in 2025, the highest rate on record, suggesting a shift from experimentation to sustained programmatic presence.

For creators, this represents a significant and growing revenue adjacency. Top islands with proven audiences are becoming media properties in their own right, capable of commanding brand integration fees, sponsored content deals, and now in-island item collaborations. The creator who can combine engagement payouts, in-island transactions, and brand partnership revenue is operating a diversified business.

First-Party vs. Creator-Made: The Platform Tension

Epic has been very active with first-party content since late 2023. The permanent return of Fortnite OG in December 2024 (which drew one point 1M CCU at launch), the June 2024 release of Fortnite Reload (a faster-respawn battle royale variant), the December 2024 launch of Ballistic (a tactical 5v5 first-person shooter in the vein of Counter-Strike), and the transformation of LEGO Fortnite into a multi-mode platform (Odyssey for survival, Brick Life for social roleplay, Expeditions for cooperative PvE) have reshaped the Fortnite content landscape.

Factor in Fortnite Festival and the steady cadence of live events from major artists like Ice Spice, Snoop Dogg, and Daft Punk, and the picture is clear: Epic’s own experiences now occupy most of the top 10 slots in Discover. This is not unusual for platform owners. But the effect on creators is real, because the most valuable Discover real estate is increasingly occupied by content that creators cannot directly compete with for algorithmic placement.

Does new first-party content lift all boats? The answer remains ambiguous. Total time in creator islands has risen, which suggests that at least some of the players drawn in by OG or Ballistic are finding their way to creator maps. But creators report that the UA-weighted formula means they only benefit from that influx if the players entering their islands qualify as “new” or “lapsed.” A veteran Fortnite player who cycles between OG and a creator island does not generate the same payout signal as a new user.

Creators who benefit most from Epic’s first-party investment are those whose islands sit closest to Epic’s own formats (combat, competition, social) or who can convert the audience influx through their own off-platform funnels. Creators operating in genres that Epic has not touched (horror, simulation, puzzle) neither benefit from nor compete with the first-party slate, but they also do not receive the spillover tailwind.

The Disney Wildcard

Disney’s $1.5B equity investment in Epic Games, announced in February 2024, remains the largest third-party bet on Fortnite as a platform. The first tangible output – Disneyland Game Rush, launched in November 2025 with seven themed mini-games spanning Star Wars, Spider-Man, and Haunted Mansion – served as a proof-of-concept. A persistent Disney universe within Fortnite, reportedly slated for Fall 2026, is the larger play.

For creators, the Disney initiative matters primarily as an audience expansion vector. If it brings non-endemic players (families, Disney fans, younger demographics) into Fortnite, the total addressable audience grows for everyone. If it primarily occupies premium Discover placement without expanding the pie, it functions as another first-party competitor. Execution will determine success, but the scale of capital committed removes ambiguity about direction: Epic is positioning Fortnite as a multi-IP platform, not a shooter with a creative mode bolted on.

The iOS Return: Symbolic Win, Modest Impact

In May 2025, after a five-year absence and a protracted legal battle that saw Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers find Apple in civil contempt for wilfully violating her 2021 anti-steering injunction, Fortnite returned to the U.S. iOS App Store. The game hit number one on the free apps chart within hours and accumulated roughly 2.8M U.S. installs in its first three weeks, with an estimated 10M downloads globally. Epic simultaneously introduced a dual-payment system: players can buy V-Bucks through Apple’s in-app purchase system or through Epic’s own payment flow, which offers a 20% bonus. Tim Sweeney reported that roughly 40% of iOS payments were processed through Epic’s system.

The return matters more to Epic’s platform-level strategy than to the Fortnite Creative ecosystem specifically. For creators, the iOS relaunch has so far produced limited incremental benefit. The install weighs nearly 13 GB fully expanded, a prohibitive size for casual mobile users, and Fortnite actually recorded its lowest average monthly player count in two years during May 2025. The more structural issue is that the vast majority of creator-made islands are designed and tested for console and PC input. Touch controls, smaller screens, and lower graphical fidelity create a meaningfully different player experience. Epic has responded with new UEFN tools that let creators simulate mobile UI and touch input directly in the editor, but adoption of mobile-optimized design remains limited.

The iOS return also arrived into a different competitive landscape. During Fortnite’s five-year absence, PUBG Mobile, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Garena Free Fire captured much of the mobile battle royale audience that Fortnite once dominated. Recapturing significant mobile share will require sustained investment in mobile-native features, something Epic has signalled with its mobile optimization toolkit for UEFN but has not delivered at scale. For creator-made content to benefit from the iOS return, creators will need to design for mobile from the ground up, not simply port console experiences to a smaller screen.

Genre Diversification and Tooling Progress

One of the most encouraging signals in Fortnite Creative is the gradual but real diversification away from combat-centric content. In 2023, creator content was still heavily dominated by combat modes: box fights, zone wars, aim trainers, and battle royale variants. By 2024, Epic reported that 30% of Fortnite Creative engagement was in non-shooting experiences. By early 2025, that share had grown to approximately a third of time spent in creator islands, with social roleplay, party games, deathruns, horror experiences, and creative building modes leading the expansion.

The clearest evidence arrived in late 2025 with the rapid rise of “brainrot”-themed games, led by Ferin’s Steal the Brainrot. Brainrot games are built around stealing, block-breaking, and exploration mechanics, not shooting. Players collect, trade, and compete for culturally memetic items in an environment that has more in common with Roblox’s social-collection genres than with Fortnite’s traditional combat core. This is not just a meme; it signals that the player base’s appetite for non-violent, socially driven gameplay has reached a scale that competes with Epic’s own marquee modes.

Genre diversification is the key precondition for Fortnite to evolve from “game with a UGC mode” to “UGC platform with a shooter soul.” As long as the creator ecosystem was overwhelmingly combat-focused, it attracted and retained essentially the same audience as Battle Royale – competitive male players between thirteen and twenty-five. Different genres bring in different demographics, expand session types, and create opportunities for monetization patterns that don’t exist in shooter contexts. The brainrot phenomenon proved the thesis: non-combat content can draw audiences at Battle Royale scale.

Fortnite is slowly developing its own equivalents of Roblox’s category-defining experiences – islands that create their own audience rather than borrowing Battle Royale’s LEGO Brick Life, though first-party, demonstrated that a social roleplay game could sustain meaningful engagement within Fortnite’s infrastructure. Creator-made social and party game islands are following a similar trajectory, though none has achieved the scale of a Roblox Brookhaven or Adopt Me.

UEFN Tool Progression

Genre diversification is partly enabled by a real step-up in UEFN capabilities over the past twelve months. The key milestones:

• Scene Graph (Beta, June 2025): A new foundational engine layer that unifies editor and runtime views, making all scene elements accessible through Verse code. Scene Graph enables scriptable, real-time modifications to objects and supports prefab workflows for reusable content. Epic has stated that Scene Graph and the Verse language will be cornerstones of Unreal Engine 6, meaning UEFN creators are effectively building skills for Epic’s next-generation toolchain.
• General Physics (Beta, Q4 2025): New Verse functions for characters and props enabling impulses, forces, angular velocity, and torque. This unlocks physics-based puzzle games, vehicle systems, and simulation genres that were previously impossible or required painful workarounds.
• LEGO Brick-by-Brick Building (June 2025): The single most requested LEGO feature arrived in UEFN, enabling creators to build with individual LEGO bricks rather than pre-made structures. This opens a new creative dimension for building-centric experiences.
• AI-Powered NPCs (Persona Device): Tools to build AI-driven characters with personalities that players can engage in conversation, enabling dynamic dialog and behavior. This is especially relevant for narrative, roleplay, and social genres.
• IP Integration Kits: Squid Game, TMNT & The Walking Dead gameplay tools (2025) and Avatar: The Last Airbender bending mechanics (expected 2026) are now available to creators, providing licensed gameplay frameworks that can be remixed into original experiences.
• Mobile-First Preview: UEFN now includes mobile preview tools with configurable aspect ratios and scalability settings, reflecting Fortnite’s growing mobile audience and the importance of cross-platform design.

On the AI tooling front, Fortnite’s development ecosystem is moving more slowly than Roblox’s. Roblox has invested heavily in AI-assisted code generation, 3D asset creation, and natural-language-to-experience tools. Fortnite creators, though, are starting to accelerate their use of AI developer tools. Epic’s native AI features (the Persona Device for NPC behavior, AI-driven testing tools) and a growing ecosystem of third-party solutions supplements them: automatic thumbnail generation tools that optimize Discover click-through rates, AI-assisted Verse code generation, and a growing library of AI-generated 3D models published to Epic’s Fab.com marketplace. The practical impact is already visible in the map production data: published maps more than doubled in 2025, and the pace of content creation shows no signs of decelerating as AI lowers the marginal cost of producing new islands.

UEFN is now technically capable of supporting deeper and more diverse games than a year ago. The bar for using these tools well has risen correspondingly. Scene Graph and Verse require genuine programming ability; physics systems demand testing infrastructure; AI NPCs need content design. The emerging winners in Fortnite Creative behave more like product teams than solo designers, which is both the platform’s aspiration and its accessibility problem.

Outlook: Fortnite Creative in 2026 and Beyond

Fortnite Creative has entered a phase that looks like neither the explosive growth of 2023–2024 nor the stagnation that critics predicted. Rather, we see a maturing platform economy where Epic is still writing the rules, value remains intensely concentrated, and commerce, tooling, and IP partnerships – rather than raw creator or player growth – are likely to drive the next major shifts.

Core Risks

• Formula volatility: Epic has already made two significant formula changes in two years. Each one disrupted creator earnings, eroded trust, and forced business model pivots. Further changes – particularly around how in-island transaction revenue interacts with engagement payouts – could destabilize the creator economy again.
• Algorithmic control over distribution: Epic maintains near-total control over Discover, the primary mechanism through which players find creator content. Creators have no equivalent of a Google search result or an App Store listing. Their visibility depends entirely on a proprietary algorithm whose mechanics are only partially disclosed.
• First-party crowding: As Epic continues to launch and expand its own modes (OG, Reload, Ballistic, LEGO, Festival, and the forthcoming Disney universe), the share of Discover real estate available to creators may continue to shrink even as total Fortnite engagement grows.
• Revenue share sunset: The 100% V-Bucks rate on in-island transactions expires in February 2027. Creators building businesses around direct commerce will see their margins nearly halved overnight. Some may respond by raising prices; others may find the economics no longer work.
• Pay-to-win concerns: In-island transactions have already generated community backlash over pay-to-win dynamics. If player sentiment turns against islands that sell gameplay-affecting items, the most lucrative commerce use cases may become socially untenable.
• Content flood and the race to the bottom: More games means more competition, and the doubling of published maps in 2025 is accelerating further as AI tools lower production costs. Expect creators to double down on any strategy that drives visibility: IP licensing, brand sponsorships, and viral “secret code” mechanics that incentivize social sharing. The darker side of this competition is already visible: XP glitches that promise free progression to attract players, unlicensed use of copyrighted characters and IP (from anime to Marvel), and engagement-farming tactics that prioritize clicks over quality. The growing volume of content will test Epic’s moderation capacity faster than the platform can scale its policing. If players come to see the Discover feed as a low-trust environment, player engagement with creator content could plateau or reverse.
• GTA VI as a potential UGC competitor: Grand Theft Auto VI, now targeting a November 2026 launch, represents a potential competitive threat on the horizon. Rockstar has reportedly met with prominent Fortnite and Roblox creators about UGC-driven experiences within GTA VI and is actively expanding its creator platforms team with roles focused on creator monetization tools. If Rockstar successfully builds a creator economy targeting an older demographic, the attention economy for UGC could fragment. The risk is not that GTA VI replaces Fortnite Creative but that it siphons away the studio-tier creators who have the most optionality. We discuss GTA VI more below.

Core Opportunities

• IAP as core game design, not an afterthought: In-island transactions will not simply add a revenue layer; they will reshape how creators design Fortnite games. Expect the most sophisticated creators to build in-app purchases into core game progression loops, incentivizing players to buy into their favorite games to unlock content, accelerate progress, or access premium experiences. This mirrors the mobile free-to-play playbook, and the creators who master it during the 100% revenue share window will have a structural advantage when the rate drops to 50% in February 2027. The economics are compelling: even at the post-sunset 37% of retail revenue, Fortnite’s creator share still exceeds Roblox’s 25%.
• The Disney audience expansion: If the persistent Disney universe launches in Fall 2026 and succeeds in drawing non-endemic players into Fortnite, the total addressable audience for creator content widens, with demographics and engagement patterns that favor exactly the kind of social, creative, and family-friendly genres where creators are diversifying.
• UEFN as an Unreal Engine 6 on-ramp: The convergence of Scene Graph, Verse, and UEFN tooling with Epic’s next-generation engine means that skills and content built on UEFN today are investments in a broader Epic ecosystem, not just Fortnite. This raises the strategic value of Fortnite Creative expertise beyond the platform itself.
• Non-combat genre leadership: The creator or studio that builds Fortnite’s first category-defining non-combat experience – the equivalent of Roblox’s Adopt Me or Brookhaven – stands to capture an outsized share of a growing audience segment with fewer established competitors.
• Multi-platform IP building: Top Fortnite Creative studios are already thinking in terms of portable IP – game concepts, characters, and brands that can extend to Roblox, mobile, Steam, and beyond. Fortnite becomes one node in a multi-platform studio strategy rather than a single-platform dependency.

Strategic Recommendations

For Creators and Studios:

• Treat Fortnite as both engine and distribution channel. Invest in growth, analytics, and IP – not just maps. Understand where you sit on the payout curve and which levers actually move you upward.
• Develop in-island transaction strategies now, while the 100% revenue share window is open. Test item economies, pricing, and player willingness to pay before the rate drops in February 2027.
• Build your own audience channels through Communities, social media, and off-platform marketing. The UA-weighted formula explicitly rewards creators who own their acquisition funnel.
• Diversify your genre slate. Studios anchored to a single combat format are maximally exposed to formula shifts and first-party competition. Multi-genre portfolios provide hedging and optionality.

For Brands and IP Owners:

• Favor integrations into proven creator ecosystems and established islands over bespoke standalone experiences. The lesson of 2024 was that brand-first islands without organic gameplay hooks underperform consistently.
• Design campaigns that respect the economics of engagement payouts and in-island transactions. Campaigns that drive measurable new-player acquisition generate more value for creator partners – and thus attract better partners.
• Think in terms of persistent presence rather than one-off activations. Sponsored Row, in-island items, and Communities provide tools for sustained brand integration that did not exist twelve months ago.
• Watch the Disney universe closely. If the persistent Disney world succeeds, it will set the template for IP-driven metaverse integrations – and the playbook will be relevant far beyond Fortnite.

The open question for Fortnite Creative in 2026 is whether it can fully make the jump from “game with a UGC side” to “UGC platform with a shooter soul” without losing either identity in the process. The tooling is getting there, the economics are getting there, and the audience is slowly broadening. The distribution layer, the formula mechanics, and the platform owner’s own content ambitions remain the binding constraints. The next 18 months will show whether those constraints are loosening or just shifting shape.

The State of Modding and Overwolf

UGC's influence in gaming extends far beyond Roblox and Fortnite. We’ve split these additional UGC ecosystems into modding (for games adding creation features through external tools, such as Overwolf’s CurseForge) and other emerging games / platforms. 

Modding

The modding ecosystem continues to demonstrate exceptional YoY growth. While not entirely apples-to-apples, leaders like CurseForge and Mod.io expanded total mod downloads by +38% and +56%, respectively. This sustained momentum confirms that significant user attention is directed toward UGC experiences beyond the two core UGC platforms previously covered, reflecting a healthy and expanding ecosystem of diverse creations.

While modding is decades old, officially supported modding has increasingly evolved into a core pillar of many live-service strategies. According to Mod.io and Gamediscover.co, 20% of the ~1,200 Steam games generating over $1M in revenue now offer an official UGC solution. Directional data suggests modding support delivers meaningful advantages: an 8% revenue uplift at launch that grows to 31% after five years, alongside a +115% retention advantage over the same period. As player-driven content becomes one of the most powerful drivers of retention, there is an increasing appetite for trusted infrastructure to operationalize UGC at scale. 

The modding landscape is anchored by four core platforms: CurseForge (the world’s largest modding ecosystem), Nexus Mods (primarily a mod distribution hub), Steam Workshop (Steam’s built-in hub for player-created content), and Mod.io (which offers a comprehensive B2B-focused SDK). All of these platforms operate differently – from CurseForge’s rewards program to Nexus’ donation points system – but CurseForge stands out as the most comprehensive and scaled platform solution for AAA studios. 

Up and coming projects, such as modding toolkit Kobo, also suggest continuous innovation toward structuring the UGC-as-a-service landscape. A notable shakeup hit the modding world in June 2025 when Chosen, a UGC-focused aggregator operating 5Mods, RenderZ, and HLT, acquired Nexus Mods. Chosen committed to preserving the platform's core model – mods remain free, no paywalls, lifetime Premium memberships honored, and reduced ads planned. The acquisition marks an acceleration in Nexus Mods' 25-year history, as Chosen moves to fully capture the UGC opportunity at scale. Nexus Mods has generated 21B mod downloads and $15.7M in creator payouts to date.

Modding is set to further grow in relevance

Modding's growing relevance is also rooted in its alignment with broader structural shifts reshaping the industry: 

• As player attention increasingly consolidates around live games rather than new releases, publishers must prioritize retention. Modding helps with exactly that, generating a community-driven content cycle that sustains engagement long after launch.
• Simultaneously, as the industry continues its cost-optimization phase, modding can serve simultaneously as a monetization layer through revenue share and a mechanism for crowdsourcing content, reducing reliance on internal live-ops resources. This added content (even high quality DLC mods) also costs the game studio ~$0.

In response, modding platforms are maturing to deliver on publishers’ needs while shaping a cohesive ecosystem for mod users and creators: 

• For users: The consolidation around the four aforementioned modding platforms significantly eases the user experience, through improved discoverability, safer download options, and seamless integration in games. 
• For creators: Modding has fully entered a new pro-modding era. Growing payouts distribution (Overwolf, which operates CurseForge, paid out $300M to creators in 2025) provide reliable monetization opportunities supporting evolution from scattered passion-driven modding projects toward established professional UGC development studios. New monetization opportunities for creators further reinforce financial sustainability. For example, CurseForge debuted premium mods in 2024 with ARK: Survival Ascended, giving creators the ability to sell high-quality, professional-grade content with a 50% revenue share. According to CurseForge, to date, these mods have generated seven figures in revenue, up 82% YoY, with 936K purchased mods. Top creators have grossed $100K–$500K each, with notable success stories such as popular modder, Sandi, for example, earning anywhere from $15K to $50K per month for his modding work. 

Looking ahead, the next frontier for modding will be cross-platform. Modding has historically been PC-exclusive due to the nature of file systems, and it still hasn’t fully made the shift to larger cross-platform availability. According to Mod.io and Gamediscover.co, among 1,000 games with more than 100k copies sold in their first month, only 2% had UGC support on PlayStation and 3% on Xbox, suggesting untapped opportunity to bring the modded experience to console ecosystems. Overwolf is already ahead of that curve. Of the games currently partnering with CurseForge For Studios, ARK: Survival Ascended has validated what cross-platform modding can look like at scale. According to CurseForge For Studios data,  console players on PlayStation and Xbox account for roughly 60% of all mod downloads and engagement for the title. Other games are likely to follow a similar pattern.

Similarly UGC or modding features on mobile devices are still few and far between, as we’ll cover below. 

The groundwork has already been laid out, with CurseForge for Studios, Mod.io, and Nexus Mods investing in the required infrastructure to allow mod distribution across platforms. The next step will come from platforms evolving from a “build on PC, distribute anywhere” to a “build anywhere, distribute anywhere” approach. Initiatives such as Eggy Party’s workshop designed as a mobile-first creation tool paves the way for seamless creation interfaces regardless of the device.

The State of Overwolf 

With Overwolf holding a clear lead in the modding/UGC category, it's worth taking a closer look at how the company performed throughout 2025. In 2025, the platform not only expanded its global reach but also delivered measurable impact for creators, studios, and players alike. This growth has been powered in large part by CurseForge, Overwolf’s modding platform and one of the largest UGC ecosystems in gaming. CurseForge For Studios gives game developers a direct integration point for community-created content and enables premium mods, which lets creators monetize their highest-quality, professional-grade content directly to players.

We see platform-wide momentum:

• Mod downloads reached 33.2B in 2025, up +38% from 24B.
• Total available mods increased by 33.11% YoY, reaching almost 460,000 active projects by the end of 2025. 
• New mod authors increased by 18.36% YoY, with over 34,300 creators publishing their first approved project in 2025.
• Overwolf reached 113M monthly active gamers, up from 100M in 2024 (+13% YoY).
• Total playtime across CurseForge for Studios mods saw a massive 63.15% YoY growth in 2025, driven by a 65.39% increase in modded sessions.
• Overwolf creator payouts (split across app creators, modders, website owners, and game server owners) totaled $300M in 2025, a 25% increase from 2024.
• Premium mods generated seven figures in revenue, representing an 81.9% YoY increase compared to 2024. ARK: Survival Ascended is the flagship example, but the program is set to expand to additional titles in 2026.

For Uri Marchand, Overwolf’s Founder and CEO, the company’s path is a direct result of shifting perspectives around UGC’s value: “We started as a guild for in-game creators, and that mission hasn't changed, but the scale of what we've built definitely has. Overwolf is now one of the largest creator-driven platforms in gaming, having paid $800M to creators to date, while reaching 113M monthly gamers and expanding partnerships with some of the world's biggest IPs and studios. The conversation in the industry has shifted from whether or not UGC belongs in AAA gaming to who is the partner that can help us integrate UGC effectively and power it at scale.”

Overwolf's Creator Ecosystem

As noted above, in 2025, total payouts to creators amounted to $300M. What makes this ecosystem notable is its breadth. Overwolf isn't serving only one kind of creator, but providing the underlying architecture for every major form of community-driven game extension spanning mods, in-game apps, servers, and websites. In effect, Overwolf has built an operating system for UGC, and the $300M in creator payouts reflects just how many layers that system now supports: 

• App Creators: Build overlays, stat trackers, and real-time tools that enhance the player experience
• Mod Authors: Create new gameplay content and mechanics that extend the lifespan of major titles
• Game Server Owners: Operate custom servers and roleplay communities with player-driven economies
• Website Owners: Run gaming hubs that provide guides, analytics, and resources for millions of players

Overwolf’s ecosystem spans five key pillars, comprehensively addressing key pieces of gaming’s creator economy: 

• Overwolf: a framework lets creators build lightweight apps using HTML, JavaScript, and the Overwolf SDK. Apps are made available through the Overwolf Appstore and monetize through ads, subscriptions, and analytics tools.
• CurseForge: the leading mod repository and client, allowing developers to create, share, and monetize their gameplay creations
• CurseForge for Studios: Provides game studios with tools and services designed to harness the power of UGC to enhance player engagement, extend the lifespan of games, and drive revenue
• Tebex: an end-to-end monetization solution for private game servers, handling webstores, payments, payouts, and subscriptions
• Nitro: an ad tech platform for gaming site publishers helping monetize traffic and maximize ad revenue

Following its acquisition by Overwolf in 2024, the Nitro vertical expanded through a landmark partnership with Tracker Network joining Nitro as a fully integrated publishing partner, plugging into Nitro’s end-to-end advertising solution. Tracker Network operates one of the most recognized multi-website and desktop app ecosystems for competitive gaming stats and performance tracking, such as Tracker.gg, Fortnite Tracker, Valorant Tracker, and R6 Tracker reaching 300M gamers worldwide.

Since a bold claim from 2023 to reach $1B in creator payouts by 2030, Overwolf has made significant strides toward this goal and reaffirmed its commitment to hitting this milestone. With continued creator payouts growth through 2025, and $800M paid out in total to date, Overwolf’s model is well on track to establish modding as a sustainable creation ecosystem. 

CurseForge for Studios: Expanding through major studio partnerships

CurseForge for Studios provides AAA studios with an end-to-end framework for launching and sustaining mod ecosystems, combining tech, creator networks, governance, brand safety guardrails, and go-to-market support. Over the past year, leading game studios have expanded or announced their partnerships with CurseForge, reflecting the continued industry shift toward officially supported modding as a core pillar of a game’s live-service strategy.

Hogwarts Legacy: In January 2025, Warner Bros. Games announced a partnership with CurseForge to introduce official PC modding support for Hogwarts Legacy. As part of the support, Hogwarts Legacy Creator Kit was made available for free on the Epic Games Store, and supports modding new quests, dungeons, and character enhancements such as cosmetics and skins. Since launch, 861 mods have generated over 27M downloads, successfully extending the game’s shelf life way past its launch while maintaining strong player activity. 

ARK: Survival Ascended: Studio Wildcard has closely collaborated with CurseForge over the past years, notably expanding its mod ecosystem by enabling cross-platform modding in 2023. There are over 5,700 ARK: Survival Ascended mods, reaching 1.1B downloads to date across free and premium mods. A notable aspect of this collaboration lies in Studio Wildcard and CurseForge partnering with entertainment brands to bring iconic IPs into games through premium, creator-driven UGC experiences. In February 2025, CurseForge announced that it was continuing its collaboration with Hasbro to bring new Power Rangers content to Studio Wildcard’s ARK: Survival Ascended through the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Wave 2 cosmetic pack. Additionally, in October 2025, Studio Wildcard released the premium ARK x Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Cosmetic Pack on CurseForge, which reached over 333K downloads to date.

inZOI: Following its early access launch in March 2025, inZOI sold over one million copies in its first week, earning instant recognition as a breakout title in the life sim genre. Krafton announced official modding support for its life sim game in partnership with CurseForge, enabling seamless, brand-safe mod distribution. To date, over 13M mods have been downloaded across 3K mods. 

Hytale: As one of the most notable game launches of the past year with strong modding support, we’ll focus on Hytale in our next section. Here again, CurseForge served as a key launch partner supporting Hytale’s official day-one modding platform. 

Overwolf's growth is a strong signal of the broader creator economy's momentum in gaming. CurseForge, in particular, demonstrates that modding is no longer a niche, grassroots endeavor. It has become a critical lever for AAA studios seeking to sustain player engagement through UGC-as-a-service, while a trusted modding management infrastructure enables key brands to establish a meaningful and lasting presence across the ecosystem. As Overwolf’s CEO puts it "I can confidently say that modding has evolved from a niche hobby into a legitimate profession over the past few years. When you see Hasbro bringing Power Rangers into ARK: Survival Ascended, or Warner Bros. unleashing modders into Hogwarts Legacy, it's clear that the industry's most popular franchises now recognize the creative power of the gaming community, and the economics prove this too.”

Focus on Key Modding-enabled Games

Minecraft continues to command the cultural zeitgeist 

2025 proved to be yet another landmark year for Minecraft, with the franchise showing no signs of slowing down. According to Newzoo, it ranked 2nd on PC and 5th on console in MAUs, finishing just ahead of Roblox on PC – a striking achievement 16 years into its lifecycle.

Minecraft's 2025 was defined by the theatrical release of A Minecraft Movie on April 5th, which proved to be one of the year's biggest cinematic events, finishing as the 5th highest-grossing film in 2025 globally and just shy of the $1B mark. The film now holds the title of 2nd highest-grossing video game movie of all time, next to the Mario and Sonic franchises. The movie also proved Minecraft's staying power with younger audiences, generating widespread virality through chaotic theater experiences and social media trends driven largely by Gen Alpha. The movie's success as a transmedia initiative was reflected in Minecraft's record monthly usage during the launch quarter, a performance Microsoft directly linked to the film's release.

Within gaming, Minecraft continues to command remarkable attention, ranking as the 7th most watched game on Twitch in 2025 and boasting the platform's third most active streamer community, behind only Fortnite and Roblox. On YouTube, the title remains one of the platform's most consumed content categories, with over 1.5 trillion hours of Minecraft content watched over its lifetime. This sustained engagement was further demonstrated in late 2025 and early 2026, as streamers rallied around Cobblemon Academy 2.0 – a Pokémon-inspired modpack offering an extensive recreation of Pokémon's core gameplay within Minecraft. The modpack's popularity not only highlighted the sophistication achievable through Minecraft's modding ecosystem but reaffirmed the title's enduring ability to capture and hold gamer attention.

Microsoft discloses little about Minecraft's UGC ecosystem, with no creator payout figures published since 2021. However, the game remains a cornerstone of both the modding and user-generated content landscape. The platform is further complicated by a fragmented structure, with Java and Bedrock editions serving distinct audiences. We recommend reading this article to understand the nuances between the Bedrock and Java versions, but in short: 

• The Java version is only available on PC, but it allows for more extensive modding, while supporting third-party servers. 
• Bedrock supports all platforms and relies on the curated Minecraft Marketplace, supporting more close-ended add-ons, and limited to featured third party servers. Creators have to join Minecraft’s partner program, approved on a case by case basis by Mojang. 

Additionally, a Chinese version is operated independently by NetEase. In 2025, the latter announced reaching the milestone of 800M registered accounts, with 1.6B CNY in lifetime developer payouts (~$230M), proving Minecraft’s ability to penetrate one of the most lucrative gaming markets. 

Over 2025, the Minecraft marketplace remained largely unchanged besides quality of life features and improvements to the Bedrock editor. On the monetization side, continuous emphasis has been placed on the Marketplace Pass, launched in 2024, a $3.99 subscription giving access to a curated pool of add-ons. On CurseForge, Minecraft Java remains the leading game, with 259K projects accounting for 56% of all mods available on the platform. Minecraft’s decision to limit brand collaborations on its platform to those officially curated by Mojang, continues to hinder the potential for non-endemic brands commissioning custom experiences on the platform. 

Looking ahead, Mojang announced a new collaboration with King to develop “Minecraft Blast,” a puzzle mobile game, with no particular UGC inclination. It also announced a $110M investment toward a Minecraft-branded Location-based Entertainment theme park attraction in partnership with Merlin Entertainments. For Minecraft, the focus seems to be on expanding IP reach and brand surface, rather than committing to developing an extensive UGC ecosystem able to compete with Roblox and Fortnite. Centrally, Mojang is looking to maintain Minecraft’s positioning as a kids-safe experience, supported by curated content to secure the game’s long-term adoption among younger audiences. 

Considering Minecraft’s trajectory compared to Roblox, we can wonder about whether it is fully capitalizing on Minecraft’s UGC potential with the game slightly at odds with Xbox’s recent acquisition strategy. It will be key to track what Microsoft’s recent reorganization will mean for Minecraft’s strategy moving forward under Asha Sharma’s leadership. Between its renewed focus on story-driven experiences and its push on hardware, Microsoft’s direction is unmistakable – and it doesn’t center on user-generated content.

Hytale D1 modding leads to explosive results

Hytale stands as one of this year's most remarkable modding success stories, despite a development journey spanning over a decade. Originally born from Hypixel, one of Minecraft's most popular servers, the team embarked on building a standalone game in 2015. Early enthusiasm was validated by a viral trailer and 2.5M pre-registrations, leading Riot Games to acquire the studio in 2020. The road nearly came to an end in June 2025, when Hypixel announced it was winding down operations and shutting the Hytale project entirely. However, co-creator Simon Collins-Laflamme reacquired the assets from Riot and pushed development forward independently, bringing the game to early access in January 2026. Positioned as a next-generation voxel RPG, Hytale reimagines Minecraft’s sandbox formula through narrative structure and RPG systems, while providing built-in creative tooling. 

Despite relying on a paid model ($19.99), the game saw massive engagement at launch. It became one of the most played early access games of all time with 2.8M players on launch day. Given the game’s emphasis on user creation and its affinity with the Minecraft ecosystem, the success translated into 10M total mod downloads on CurseForge in just two weeks. More than 2,000 creators published over 3,000 mods, making Hytale one of the fastest-growing mod communities to launch on the platform. As of February, 3K unique mod creators have created 5K mods which have been downloaded 20M times, with Hypixel sourcing some of its team directly from the creator community. According to Overwolf’s CEO, “Hytale is a perfect example of what that future looks like as a studio that not only leaned into the strength of its creator communities from day one, but is hiring those same creators to join the team. We're moving toward a world where day-one modding is the default and creators aren't just an afterthought on how to extend a game's life, but actively shaping it from launch.” 

The question for Hytale will be whether the game is able to convert this early momentum into long-term success, while delivering on its ambitious development roadmap. The game will have to navigate maintaining its community engagement, while providing meaningful differentiation from the Minecraft juggernaut to expand beyond its current niche of Minecraft fans. So far, early Twitch viewership metrics suggest a massive drop post-launch, from 144M hours watched in January 2026, to only 2.6M over the past 30 days. 

Other notable modding communities

GTA V / VI: Rockstar Games launched the Cfx Marketplace in January 2026, marking a major shift in its approach to modding following its 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, the developers behind the popular FiveM and RedM multiplayer roleplay frameworks. Previously known for cracking down on unauthorized mods, Rockstar now supports a curated digital storefront where select verified creators – initially around 16, with more planned – can share and sell user-generated content like scripts, maps, vehicles, clothing, characters, props, and bundles such as theme parks or activity packs. The platform includes hundreds of mods tailored for private servers, phased rollout for quality control, streamlined purchases for server owners and players, enhanced compatibility and security, and a clear monetization path that builds on Rockstar's endorsement of roleplay communities.

The decision to collaborate with a selected group of established developers indicates that Rockstar is following the Minecraft Marketplace playbook rather than pursuing a more open-ended platform such as Roblox or UEFN. Centrally, it allows Rockstar to keep tighter creative control on the content on its IP, while nurturing an ecosystem of professional creators around its game. 

The launch of Cfx Marketplace also constitutes a strong signal for modding support in GTA VI as it lays the foundation for UGC integration in any future Rockstar games. While no official plans for GTA VI have been released, reports hint at Rockstar considering UGC collaborations ahead of the game’s launch. Given the massive UGC potential in GTA VI, the proven community engagement around GTA V’s servers, and the newly-released infrastructure foundations, UGC support in GTA VI appears to be a question of “when” and “how” rather than “if.” At the moment, GTA VI has no confirmed plans for simultaneous releases on PC, with only console releases planned for November 2026. Given Rockstar’s typical release plan, it is likely that PC will come a year later, which could, in turn, push back UGC support in GTA VI to a later date.

Palworld, after reaching the 32M players milestone in February 2025, continues to see strong engagement ranging at ~50K daily peak concurrent users on Steam. This long-term engagement is supported by the developers’ commitment to modding, officially supporting Steam Workshop modding since the December 2025 "Home Sweet Home" update. In the meantime, Palworld has already received 2.1K mods on Nexus Mods and 396 on CurseForge. 

Monster Hunter Wilds, released in February 2025, is seeing significant modding engagement with the game ranking 39th in all-time mod downloads on Nexus Mods, at 33M. Despite strong adoption, Capcom has taken a careful stance with modding, publicly warning about unauthorized game modification, highlighting that modding penetration is still not ubiquitous.

Arma Reforger provides a great case study for cross-platform modding potential. It extended support for its Arma sandbox ecosystem to PlayStation 5 in May 2025, alongside a dedicated modding competition. It resulted in a significant engagement surge, surpassing two point one million copies sold across all platforms, and a 15K-player surge on PlayStation 5 alone following the update. 

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II announced official modding support via Steam Workshop, including the launch of CryEngine Sandbox editor for asset modification, scripting, and debugging, although not allowing commercial use. KCD2 mods are particularly popular on Nexus Mods with 17.6M downloads for 2.2K mods. 

Stellar Blade, despite no official modding support, has publicly endorsed community modding and confirmed full, unrestricted mod support for the PC version released in June 2025, allowing players to install mods via community tools without restrictions. Director Kim Hyung-tae further recognized the modding community and indicated support for expanding tools that enable gameplay-altering mods. Stellar Blade currently sits as the 31st largest game of all time on Nexus Mods with 37.3M downloads for 2.3K mods. 

Other Emerging Platforms and Live Service UGC

Secondary UGC Platforms enter a consolidation phase

The broader UGC platform ecosystem has faced significant headwinds in 2025, with secondary platforms experiencing studio closures, layoffs, cancellations, and delayed or failed launches. 

Mindseye's launch in June 2025 largely missed the mark for Build A Rocket Boy, marked by technical issues and poor user reception. Led by ex-Rockstar developer Leslie Benzies, the studio had previously raised about ~$150M in total funding and was one of the most highly funded UGC projects. Mindseye started as a game built within Everywhere, an ambitious Roblox-like creation platform, with the goal to act as a flagship to acquire initial users while demonstrating the potential of Everywhere’s UGC features.

The game launched to a 33 Metacritic score (the worst rated game of 2025 at the time), pointing multiple technical issues, outdated mission design, and empty open world with excessive cutscenes and linear structure. Shortly after, Sony issued refunds for the PS5 version, while Steam concurrent user counts dropped below 1K a week after launch. The studio initiated a redundancy process shortly after launch, potentially affecting over 100 employees out of around 500 total staff, ended its partnership with its publisher IO Interactive, and the studio founder temporarily stepped away from operations. The central question for Build A Rocket Boy is whether the studio can right the ship and address the game’s stability, while delivering on its UGC and multiple ambitions.

Web3-powered UGC platforms continue to face a phase of reckoning, contending simultaneously with growing platform concentration and waning momentum for blockchain technology: 

• The Sandbox is a blockchain and digital land-based metaverse enabling user-generated gaming experiences, NFT creation, and monetization via SAND tokens. It announced in 2025 the layoff of 250 employees, representing 50% of its workforce, alongside leadership transitions for its co-founders. The cuts follow a $20M funding round at a $1B valuation in 2024. Looking ahead, The Sandbox is broadening its ambitions beyond gaming with Sandbox 3.0, framing itself as “global distribution ecosystem of culture and IP that connects people, brands, creators, institutions, and consumers worldwide. Anchored by SAND as the foundational economic layer”. Given the current state of web3, and the SAND token losing an additional 75% of its market value over the past year, there is little evidence to suggest that a meaningful recovery is on the horizon. 
• Hiber, the Swedish-based startup behind the development Hiberworld, filed for bankruptcy after raising about $20M over its lifetime. Hiberworld was a browser-based platform for user-generated 3D games and social experiences, integrating a web3 layer allowing users to import and use NFTs from partners directly in the platform's virtual worlds. 
• Overdare, developed as a joint venture between Krafton (PUBG) and Naver (Zepeto), is a mobile‑first UGC platform where users both build and play 3D games and social experiences. It’s supported by an in-game economy powered by Circle (issuer of USDC), combined with a custom blockchain called Settlus. In May 2024, OVERDARE announced an alpha test of the platform, with the game now available in the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico with no clear announcements for a global rollout (and minimal coverage in Krafton’s earnings reports). The game appears to be in a development limbo for now. 
• Manticore Games, known for developing the Core UGC platform, was once valued at ~$601M following a $100M series C in March 2021. Manticore Games pivoted toward Web3 in mid-2022 amid challenges growing its Core UGC platform, aiming to attract NFT communities for new user growth and monetization. After a layoff round in 2023, the studio pivoted again to launch Out of Time, a multiplayer roguelike game launched as an Epic Game Store exclusive in September 2025, and later that year on Steam to minimal performance. While the game relies on the Core UGC platform as its foundation, enabling features like player housing, custom modes, gear combinations, and dynamic content creation/sharing among players, the studio’s emphasis on UGC features appears to be minimal for now, but rather focusing on polishing the core gameplay experience. 

VR-oriented UGC platforms similarly underwent a tough year: 

• Meta’s Reality Labs, which underpins all of Meta’s XR-related efforts, reported $19.1B in losses in 2025, up from $17.7B in 2024. In early 2026, Meta announced layoffs affecting about 10% of Reality Labs’ staff (~1K employees); this was paired with explicit plans to cut down 30% of Meta’s metaverse budget over the coming year. Horizon Worlds is pivoting to a primarily mobile-first platform in 2026, separating it from VR headsets like Quest to focus on broader accessibility and competition with Roblox and Fortnite. According to Sensor Tower, the mobile app has generated $500K in revenue and 10M downloads over 2025, suggesting a tough road ahead to match the reach and scale of leading UGC platforms – much less drive ROI on Meta’s years-long funding.
• Rec Room, which had previously raised ~$294M in total funding, with its latest known round in December 2021 valuing the company at $3.5B, announced significant workforce cuts in 2025. As part of a major restructuring, the company let go of 50% of its staff, while stating it would lower its emphasis on UGC: “Less work on broad UGC expansion – e.g., Maker Pen on mobile/controller, Maker AI. [...] We are not abandoning UGC. But we are narrowing our focus away from “everyone can create” in favor of serving our very best creators.”

Additionally, other high-profile cancellations can be noted: Pahdo Labs, a gaming startup founded in 2021, raised a total of around $17M to build anime-inspired multiplayer games, alongside a UGC platform for player-created anime-style content and mods. After launching Starlight Re:Volver in early access in 2025, to mixed player reviews and low engagement, Pahdo Labs shut down completely in early 2026. EA’s Project Rene, long rumored to be the Sims 4 successor, has “evolved into a social, collaborative, mobile-first life-sim game. It is not the successor to The Sims 4 and is a separate experience from any future deep, single player life simulation experience”, while EA reemphasized support for the Sims 4, suggesting the sequel is most likely far from being launch-ready. Even Riot’s decision to shut down Hytale (later re-acquired by its founder), was a strong signal of large-scale publishers reevaluating their UGC investments. 

Branded experiences offer another telling sign of the UGC ecosystem's maturing. Non-endemic brands, once dispersed across a wide range of virtual worlds, have progressively concentrated their investments around Roblox and Fortnite – a shift reflected in GEEIQ data showing the two platforms' share of virtual brand activations jumping from 48% to 88%. This shift signals a move from exploratory spending to performance-driven strategy, with brands prioritizing platforms that offer demonstrated results and measurable returns. The consequence is a self-reinforcing cycle: as branded budgets concentrate on the leading platforms, competing platforms attract fewer resources, making financial sustainability for professional UGC studios increasingly elusive elsewhere. In other worlds, network effects are at play whereby platform dominance compounds over time, leaving challengers structurally disadvantaged.

What should we make of these multiple headwinds? 

This market contraction is best understood as the tail end of a hype-driven investment cycle. The metaverse narrative that dominated 2021-2022 channeled substantial capital into UGC companies and virtual worlds, many of which are now exhausting their runway years later. The hardest-hit segments in 2025 were VR and Web3-oriented virtual worlds, confirming that some of the era's boldest promises – like interoperability and fully immersive environments – never fully materialized. Yet gaming UGC as a broader theme remains intact, as evidenced by Roblox's continued growth, underscoring that platforms genuinely serving consumer needs still find traction in today's environment.

The struggles of many of the studios noted above illustrate just how steep the road to platform effects in UGC ecosystems can be. These companies are competing directly against Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft – platforms a decade or more in the making, with entrenched player bases and deep penetration among professional UGC studios and creators. If it wasn't obvious before, network effects as a competitive advantage are significant, and these compounding effects affect everything, from the scale of R&D, to creator payout budgets. 

While we can’t completely rule out new Roblox-like platforms emerging thanks to, for example, technology differentiation, recent cases of sustainable UGC ecosystems have been built on top of successful products (Minecraft and Fortnite among others). In a market where multiple well-funded live service games have failed to retain meaningful audiences, layering in UGC capabilities compounds an already high-risk equation. It doesn't make sense to compete as an emerging platform without an unfair wedge into the market. This will lead to two structuring trends: 

• While we might see further concentration from a platform standpoint, we will see a diversity of successes built on top of it, from successful professional UGC studios to UGC tooling. 
• With increasing barriers to entry for up and coming UGC platforms, we will see a shift in how the industry approaches UGC: less greenfield platform-building, and more UGC-as-a-service integrations that bring creator tools to games that have already achieved scale, as Fortnite did through UEFN, or through Overwolf-type solutions. 

Mobile UGC still needs to find its breakthrough in the West

Mobile avatar social apps

Social UGC apps such as ZEPETO, IMVU, Highrise, and Bud generally failed to sustain momentum over 2025, with diminishing metrics across the board on mobile. ZEPETO, the avatar-based social metaverse app by Naver Z, remains the leading platform in this category, thanks to an extensive active base. The platform stands out through its ability to attract brands, thanks to its female-dominated Gen Z audience, and viral social features (avatar-led formats like booths, and livestreams). The platform’s reach remains however mostly limited to Asia, with 54% of its active player base located in Asia, and concentrated among emerging markets with low disposable income such as Indonesia (24%) and Thailand (6%). Highrise, previously reached a $250M lifetime revenue milestone in 2024, but now faces diminishing activity.

Overall, this segment faces mounting pressure from the expanding Roblox ecosystem, which increasingly replicates the core offerings of Social UGC apps. Notably, Roblox's TikTok-inspired experience Clip It amassed one billion views and drew direct inspiration from Zepeto's booth mechanic, while fashion-focused experiences like Dress to Impress (9B lifetime visits) signals Roblox's deepening foothold in fashion. As a result, these mobile apps are likely to remain niche, locally anchored experiences – or progressively lose relevance as the broader market consolidates around a handful of dominant platforms.

Party Games UGC

Signs of waning relevance in the party games UGC segment were already visible in last year's report. That trend accelerated markedly through 2025, with Eggy Party, Dreamstar, and Stumble Guys each recording revenue and activity declines of 30–50%. Lilith Games' decision to lay off part of its Project Party team and reboot development on its planned Eggy Party competitor serves as a further indication that the segment is losing steam.

Despite declining metrics, Eggy Party maintains substantial scale, generating $106M in yearly iOS revenues alone – with 92% concentrated in China per SensorTower, suggesting a stronger overall performance masked by limited global reach. Within its home market, the title has cultivated a thriving UGC ecosystem, surpassing 50M creators in 2025 and distributing 100M yuan (~$15M) in creator incentives. The recently announced Eggitor professional PC editor marks the next step in the platform expanding its creative capabilities. With Eggy Party holding strong, while Stumble Guys plummets in the west, the party games’ segment has seemingly failed to expand UGC creation on mobile globally, and is bound to remain a China-specific trend in the foreseeable future.

Other Live-service UGC 

A familiar East-West divide resurfaces when examining the wider mobile gaming market. Chinese developers in particular are making bold, large-scale moves to embed UGC into their flagship mobile titles, fully recognizing the potential of UGC features for long-term engagement. Western studios, by contrast, have largely stayed on the sidelines with Stumble Guys being one of the rare exceptions of a live mobile game adding in UGC features post-launch.

Genshin Impact made the most significant UGC move of 2025 with the October 22 launch of Miliastra Wonderland, a permanent game mode introduced as part of the Luna II cycle. The mode gives players a sandbox editor to build and share custom stages – ranging from mini-games and puzzles to arenas – alongside social lobbies, seasonal events, and a dedicated Miliastra Pass linked to the game's existing Battle Pass. To incentivize content creation, miHoYo introduced the Inspiration Incentive Program, a recurring, time-limited scheme through which published stages can earn tickets, exchangeable for real-money payouts via the Creator Center, with standout stages also eligible for commercial collaboration opportunities. While performance data has yet to be disclosed, the launch is a clear signal of Chinese publishers deepening their reliance on UGC as a core retention and monetization strategy within existing live-service titles.

PUBG accelerated its UGC strategy significantly in 2025, building on a foundation that dates back to March 2023 when Tencent introduced World of Wonder (WoW) maps in PUBG Mobile. At launch, Tencent backed the initiative with a $100M commitment over three years through the Wonder Creators Network. After years of iteration and experimentation, WoW 1.0 officially launched on September 4, 2025. The scale of engagement has been remarkable: by August 2025, the platform hosted over 3.3M user-created maps and accumulated 24B play sessions. PUBG's PC version is now following suit, with the PUBG: Battlegrounds UGC editor entering alpha on July 9, 2025.

Free Fire has long benefited from a UGC mode called Craftland, launched in 2021 alongside Free Fire MAX. In 2025, however, it launched in November 2025 its first official Craftland Creator Program, a tiered rewards system for top Free Fire MAX map creators. While no high-level payout numbers have been made public, it marks another sign of acceleration toward setting up a more professional and viable UGC ecosystem. 

2026 might finally be the year UGC features fully permeate mobile gaming. Western publishers have to adapt quickly or risk falling behind on a significant consumer trend for mobile gamers. 

What’s next for UGC platforms in 2026? 

As the UGC ecosystem consolidates and new releases struggle to gain traction, investors have adopted a markedly more cautious stance. According to Investgame data, early-stage venture funding for UGC companies has fallen sharply since 2022, declining by a factor of six over three years to just $24M, while the number of recorded investments hit a new low of only nine deals in 2025. Though this contraction partly reflects a broader industry-wide pullback in VC activity, it also signals the end of an exuberance phase for UGC, giving way to a more measured and selective investment environment.

Some clear trends can however be identified for 2026: 

1. The playbook for launching next-generation UGC platforms is evolving: lead with a compelling game release to ignite platform dynamics rather than building infrastructure in isolation. Rockstar has yet to officially confirm UGC features for GTA VI, though reported talks with UGC developers suggest the title will launch as a landmark game release before layering in creator tools. Omni Creator Products is taking a similar approach, planning to release a social game codenamed "Muse" to generate initial traction before scaling their broader UGC ecosystem. Embedding UGC into the launch strategy (like Hytale did) can also help extend available content at launch, and support community engagement early, though success will remain tied to the game’s inherent appeal. 

S&box, a game creation platform developed by Facepunch Studios (Valve) and built on Valve's Source 2 engine, is poised to be one of the most notable UGC launches of 2026. In development since 2017, the project serves as a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod. With the latter still holding a place in Steam's Top 100 most played games more than 20 years after launch, the demand for what comes next is undeniable.

1. AI-powered UGC platforms is the next key investment theme: Despite significant investment in creator tooling, UGC platforms like Roblox and Fortnite still demand a level of technical proficiency that limits active creators to a small fraction of their user bases. Generative AI is now enabling a new wave of platforms to fundamentally rethink this dynamic, replacing complex development workflows with prompt-based interactions and embedding creation directly into the gameplay experience. Platforms like Bitmagic are already seeing early traction, while seed-stage startups including Oasiz, GameByte, and Storycraft raised funding in 2025 to pursue this opportunity. As incumbents are already doubling down on AI initiatives, AI could also further entrench existing market leaders. It remains to be seen how these startup initiatives will grow next to Roblox’ considerable R&D capabilities. 
2. UGC tooling innovations are addressing professional UGC studios’ emerging needs: The multi-billion dollar UGC developer payout market is giving rise to a new class of creators with distinct Gametech and tooling needs that remain largely unaddressed, spurring the emergence of purpose-built UGC tooling companies. For example, Craftbench is an AI toolkit dedicated to Minecraft content creation, enabling developers to generate pipeline-ready textures with ease. Oncade provides game studios and UGC creators with infrastructure for real-money payouts, virtual currency cash-outs, revenue sharing, and direct-to-consumer distribution. Gamebeast equips UGC developers with real-time analytics, live-ops tools, and user engagement features to optimize their games post-launch. Superbiz develops a suite of monetization measurement and analytics tools purpose-built for UGC platforms.

Beyond near-term investment slowdowns, there is no shortage of reasons to remain excited about the UGC category's future. Looking ahead, a particularly compelling theme on the horizon is the structural advantage UGC platforms hold in an AI-enabled gaming industry. In an environment where proprietary training data is a critical moat, these platforms are effectively sitting on a goldmine fueled by continuous user creations. It is no coincidence that Minecraft is emerging as a testing ground for AI agents and world model development, or that Roblox is doubling down with its 4D AI strategy. General Intuition's landmark $133.7M fundraise, built around Medal's video UGC content, is a strong argument for seeing gameplay UGC content platform as a defining force in the generative AI landscape ahead. 

Developer Payouts

Total developer payouts of the top three platforms surpassed the $2B milestone in 2025, reaching $2.2B – a 46% YoY increase and a 35% CAGR since 2023, marking a clear acceleration in creator monetization. Roblox was the primary engine of this growth, contributing an amount equivalent to the entire industry's 2024 payouts on its own. This outsized performance pushed Roblox's share of total creator payouts to 69%, up from 62% the prior year, reflecting a slightly more concentrated competitive landscape.

As payout opportunities have expanded, Roblox has become the most competitive platform for UGC developers, averaging $600 in payouts per creator. This figure is tempered by the large proportion of hobbyists on the platform who create without any monetization intent. In practice, just 29,000 developers met the DevEx eligibility threshold in 2025, translating to average payouts of $50K among qualifying creators. Fortnite's condensed creator community yields higher average monetization of ~$5K per creator, illustrating that alternative platforms can offer competitive financial returns. Overwolf similarly reflects a healthy monetization environment, with average payouts at $1.6K per creator, up 22% YoY. This growth signals that Overwolf's expanding platform activity is translating into tangible financial upside for its creator base.

To put these numbers into perspective, Gamalytic data shows ~90,000 Indie and Hobbyist developers on Steam collectively generating $2.7B in yearly revenues. This translates to an average of $20,090 per publisher, twice lower than the average payouts for Roblox DevEx participants. While no perfect apples-to-apples comparison can be made here, the central learning is that the UGC development ecosystem at large has fully matured into a significant market opportunity, and a viable option for developers looking to make games. Another striking observation: total UGC developer payouts are close to matching the entire Steam indie segment, and on track to surpass it within a year or two, highlighting the sheer scale of opportunities in UGC for developers looking for their development platform of choice.

Looking ahead, and in line with aforementioned signs of market concentration, and Fortnite’s slowing growth it is now clear that the UGC ecosystem is moving toward a winner-take-most landscape. While there's increasing concentration in winning UGC platforms due to network effects and scale advantages, there remains a long-tail UGC opportunity for devs both on those platforms but also across the industry as a whole, as companies fight for scarce gamer attention.

Conclusion

Last year, we noted that the unifying thread across the UGC segment was accessibility. It had never been easier to create and consume UGC content across platforms, and this helped lay the foundation for 2025’s acceleration.

As accessibility remains a tailwind, there are two unifying themes this year. 

The first is divergence. In terms of unified UGC platforms, Roblox is running laps around its competition. While there can be more than one winner, network effects and scale advantages enable the biggest winners to keep on winning. While Fortnite Creative has real potential to improve, Roblox’s top dog momentum is unequivocally unrivaled. Plus, there is divergence across types of UGC. Whereas platforms like Roblox and Fortnite represent a small but growing and disruptive percentage of industry-wide revenue, modding is crushing it by helping great “traditional” games become more engaging than ever.

The second is public attention. Last year, Roblox received outsized attention from the investment industry as it waded through a (poorly constructed) short attack. Now, it’s entered the big leagues where governments around the world are paying closer attention. As we’ve seen with other big tech networks like Meta, that’s a one-way door that will only grow louder as the company’s success grows. Precedents set around Roblox will shape regulatory expectations for the broader UGC ecosystem.

Looking forward, it’s clear that AI will accelerate UGC creation across all domains of media, gaming included. While AI isn’t everything that matters, we expect it to become a larger point of emphasis over the next couple years as models improve and enhanced toolsets get deployed to more creators. While we reserve the right to be wrong, it’s likely that AI will both entrench the largest UGC players (who have data advantages and can afford the R&D and CapEx investments required to embed great new features for outsized creators and audiences) and lead to the creation of entirely original experiences that may fit new consumption models. We’re excited to see what happens.

Regardless, the UGC snowball keeps rolling down the mountain, and its effect on the rest of the industry is going to become more outsized.

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