Unreal Editor for Fortnite(UEFN), which allows anyone to create their own content within Fortnite, is growing in both its versatility and the volume of UEFN creations.

However, there’s a chronic lack of diversity and innovation in the content created thus far. Most of the popular creations are derivative of Fortnite’s gameplay and style, and this homogeneity poses a challenge to Epic's goal of expanding Fortnite into a vibrant, wide-ranging ecosystem.

Epic is gradually opening up new UEFN assets and abilities, but doing so alongside all sorts of other platform enhancements takes time. That said, we already have a sense of what is working on UEFN versus Roblox, based on what genres creators operate in and how the platforms monetize.

We dive into the data below (largely from Rolimons and Fortnite.gg), share a few takeaways, and explore what’s next.

Fortnite Creative

Monetization Metrics

Unlike Roblox, there is no way for players to spend Fortnite’s premium currency, V-Bucks, inside UEFN maps. Instead, Epic sets aside 40% of Fortnite’s revenue to pay creators based on metrics that contribute to the continued success of Fortnite. Attribution in this case is a bit tricky, but it boils down to the following metrics:

• Engagement:
  • Active playtime: Active time players spend on your map.
  • Playtime surrounding V-Bucks spent: Active playtime within a week (before or after) of a player spending V-Bucks.
  • Active players: Number of daily unique players on your map.

• Retention:
  • Retained players: Players who have played your map and returned to Fortnite in the following seven days.
  • Recurring retained: Players who have played on your map and then played Fortnite frequently in the following seven days.

• User(re-) acquisition:
  • New players:  Players who visit your map on their very first day in Fortnite.
  • Returning players: Players who visit your map on their first day back after being absent from Fortnite for at least 28 days.

The hope with these metrics is that there is at least some correlation between a UEFN map and increased or returning play. Only one of the metrics directly correlates to spending, so creators will have to focus on a mix of retention and new player outreach.

In the long term, Epic hopes for growth in player acquisition metrics to broaden the player base. Unlike Roblox, there is no way for creators to directly promote within Fortnite Discovery, and they will have to rely on promotion from Fortnite’s various algorithms, mixed with outside social media promotion. Eventually, things like optimizing titles, descriptions, and/or thumbnails will be crucial — if they aren’t already.

Creative Content Spread

To help focus our analysis, we used an active player count sampled from a single normal day in July. Due to inconsistent tag usage and the vagueness of many genres, we manually sorted the maps into appropriate categories for the comparison. There are also over 205K maps currently, so the data is limited to just the top genres and maps (those with 500-plus active players) to focus on the biggest impact.

Content from Epic is also removed from this analysis as it is focused entirely on UEFN content.

First let’s start with a breakdown of the most popular genres by active players at the time of data gathering.

Here is the view in pie chart form so that we can see the current market share breakdown:

A quick explanation of the genres, especially since many are Fortnite-related:

• Boxfights: PvP battles in tight spaces that may or may not include building abilities.
• Zone Wars: Similar to box fights, but with shrinking zones (faster versions of battle royale).
• TDM/FFA: Team Deathmatch (often labeled Red vs Blue) and Free For All.
• Just for Fun/Escape/Deathrun/Parkour: A mix of obstacle courses, climbing games, prop hunts, and horror games.
• Tycoon/Simulation: The tycoon genre involves players building up virtual empires by managing resources, constructing facilities, and expanding their operations, with some overlap with idle games.
• Role Playing/Party/Survival Horror: These three share some commonalities, with role-playing leaning toward social simulation (including a copy of the popular Roblox Prison Breakout RP game), party tending toward social mini-games, and survival horror either being single player scares or 1vX-style play.
• Bed Wars/Bases: Centered around attacking/defending bases.
• 1v1: Other 1v1 games that aren’t the above modes (usually shooters).

The biggest takeaway from the data is how the three most popular categories all fall under a broader “shooters” genre and reflect smaller, customized versions of Fortnite Battle Royale.

This makes sense, as existing players may treat these user-created maps as places to warm up, train, or simply explore. There is more map genre diversity than noted here, but it’s not reflected in the bulk of player activity, and hence in monetization.

In short, UEFN has struggled to unlock creator successes across new genres, which also limits whom the Fortnite ecosystem can best serve.

It’s worth noting that when looking purely at the number of maps included per genre, there has also been a trend toward tycoon and simulator games in the past five-six months. While tycoon-style games have very little relation to Fortnite gameplay, they are often successful for driving up the types of metrics Epic is using on other platforms like Roblox and the Epic funded competitor Core.

Players of tycoon maps will generally treat them like fairly active idle games. They run up longer playtimes as well as longer retention due to continuing progress systems and daily check-ins. These can also work as light social lobbies where players can chat while managing their systems. That allows for a constant feeling of progress and busywork activity that can be a welcome break from the Fortnite grind.

Epic’s Diversity Push

One way Epic is attempting to expand its audience and empower more creators is by diversifying the types of activities it natively supports beyond combat. While UEFN is growing and is an opportunity for that diversity to be fostered, the majority of players will still stick to content made by Epic for now, especially around events. UEFN has made meaningful progress, but Epic’s own modes still account for nearly 60% of active players.

Much like the UEFN focus on Fortnite-style play, there is also little traction for the other modes Lego Fortnite, Festival, and Rocket Racing.

Epic clearly wants to expand the types of experiences available to keep the Fortnite ecosystem stickier. Unfortunately, anything not Fortnite struggles to get traction when the novelty wears off.

The big concert events — like the recent one with Metallica — do manage to drive excitement around the Festival mode, but it's generally short-lived, event-based excitement. The former Harmonix devs acquired by Epic have managed to increase a longer tail interest in the experience with a Rock Band-like experience, but it’s unlikely this form of licensed content will be available to UEFN creators.

Epic has managed to open up the assets and interactions from both Lego and Rocket Racing into UEFN, but so far they have seen very little usage from creators and players. The hope is that in the long term, the increase of content and tools will provide enough materials for more diverse UEFN experiences, such as creators expanding out the Lego Fortnite experience in new ways using the branded assets.

Epic has also fragmented the core Battle Royale experience across eight different modes: the Reload (“classic” Fortnite), Zero-Build and Ranked variations, and the Save the World PvE mode. It’s clear that even within the variations, the majority of the players came for the Battle Royale-based experience and often with building. Hopefully as the ecosystem matures, there will be alternative experiences with enough traction to capture any players that churn or need a break from Battle Royale play.

Epic has a real problem nudging a significant number of players outside classic Fortnite modes. This can be a big problem for Epic’s metaverse ambitions if players tire of the Battle Royale gameplay without latching onto anything else on offer.

It is worth noting that the UEFN tools themselves are still relatively new and initially focused on Epic-created experiences. The expectation from Epic is that increasing the diversity of functionality could help push it toward more breakout hits that leverage this more accessible version of the Unreal Engine.

It will take time for both functionality and content increases to inspire a successful user-created experience. As an example, Epic added an orthographic camera system to facilitate 2D games, but sadly, the stats show very little interest thus far, and this may need other supporting functionality to find a breakout idea.

Roblox Is a Heavy Contrast

For comparison, it’s worth looking at the genres with traction in Roblox. Two obvious caveats: First, Roblox itself has no base game to play; everything is UGC. And second, its monetization relies on how many Robux players spend in a game or burn through by purchasing content. Roblox has, of course, been around far longer than UEFN and took a significant amount of time to become the success it is now.

With that said, when looking at the top 50 games on Roblox, we see a very different category mix compared to UEFN.

Roblox’s top genre is city/town role-playing, a mix between a hangout lobby and “playing house” reminiscent of The Sims Online. Adventure/RPG is broad, but typically it's a mix of narrative content and action gameplay. For simplicity, the simulation category here also combines simulations and tycoon games, both of which are quite popular. Fighting involves combat, but it is often much lighter and less aggressive than Fortnite’s competitive style.

The top genres in Roblox have found a more natural place in terms of retention through a mix of social and progression systems. City/town role-playing has been especially strong, as something close to The Sims Online appeals to a younger audience interested in life simulations as they come of age.

Individual game creators have also co-opted many F2P designs for gameplay and monetization that leverage the tools Roblox provides for IAP and subscriptions in individual games. Roblox also caters to a somewhat different audience because of its graphical style, lack of a core game, and marketing. There are also options for creators to pay for Roblox to advertise their games, allowing for money to be spent to push more diverse options manually instead of hoping for organic growth. Genres here will be an interesting area to watch, not only because of organic shifts, but also due to the growing interest from game studios and brands to push in different directions than the youth might.

Epic’s “Metaverse” Future

Epic wants to leverage its war chest and massive player base to anticipate and build out the future of online social activity, capturing audiences beyond Fortnite’s initial success.

Despite Epic being solid game developers and creating a phenomenal game engine, it's difficult to always be ahead of the next big thing. One thing Epic does have working for it is an ability to drive significant revenue toward successful creators in the hopes of motivating future success, without the same demographic problem Roblox has.

The big challenge for Epic isn’t just encouraging the development of the next great thing, it’s getting anything outside of Fortnite’s core modes played by significant numbers of people. So it really isn’t helping that the only potential players even exposed to UEFN content are those already playing Fortnite.

Unlike Roblox, there isn’t a way to browse UEFN content on the web and launch the game from there. You have to actually be in the Fortnite client to browse and launch these games.

There is definitely opportunity here for Epic to push more outside its current audience and promote high-potential content outside of the Fortnite client. Lego Fortnite and the live concerts have helped attract broader interest, and the massive Disney partnership could do even more if handled right, picking up where Disney Infinity left off. The upcoming mobile Epic Games Store could also help, as Epic will have a lot more freedom in how it markets Fortnite and UEFN.

It’s hard to say if Epic will adopt the Roblox model of allowing the spending of V-Bucks within UEFN maps — as that comes with some risks — but it can also dramatically increase overall spending. As UEFN experience diversity does grow, there are strong incentives for Epic to consider better promotion of these experiences and help drive a more active player base, including for Lego- and Rocket Racing-based creations that help feed players of those modes.

It’s likely Epic will also introduce more diverse modes of its own that will feed into player expansion and ideally content functionality expansions for UEFN. There’s also potential for Epic to run some large creator competitions, hackathons, and promotions once UEFN reaches a mature enough point that creators can comfortably do things outside of Fortnite-style play.

The platform has huge potential to inspire the next generation of Unreal Engine game developers, and even increase competition with Unity for certain kinds of games. We hope to see Epic continue to use its Fortnite money to build up UEFN as a game platform that grows game development, at a time when the industry could use the help.

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Content Worth Consuming

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Q2 2024 Live streaming trends report (StreamHatchet): “Live streaming is experiencing renewed growth in Q2, with a 12% year-over-year increase, marking the first significant rise since the pandemic. Over the last quarter, Rumble has solidified itself as a promising platform, particularly for smaller creators. It was the 7th most-watched platform in Q2 2024 with 122M hours watched.”

Crafting Winning Games: The Critical Role of Consumer Insights with the Best in the Business (Deconstructor of Fun): “We assembled an Avengers-style team of Consumer Insights leaders from publishers and Vendors Blizzard, Riot, Zynga, and Beta Hat to dig into how Consumer Insights can help Devs and Marketers make and market successful games. The team digs into how each company approaches CI, uncovers trends around older and younger gamers, and gives tips for teams looking for financing or greenlight. The session is filled with tips and stories, helpful to anyone in the games industry.”

Netflix Games and the Necessity of Gaming for Legacy Media(with Joost van Dreunen)(Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Joost van Dreuen, the CEO of Aldora, a data insights platform. Joost is also an adjunct professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, the author of the SuperJoost Playlist newsletter, and a well-known analyst of the mobile gaming ecosystem. Joost and I discuss Netflix's gaming efforts to date, as well as the expansion of many legacy media companies into gaming.”

Inside CD Projekt RED: Michal Nowakowski on The Witcher, Cyberpunk, and Gaming's Future(The Fourth Curtain): “Our guest this week is Michal Nowakowski the co-CEO of CD Projekt Red, the renowned studio behind iconic games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. With nearly two decades at CD Projekt, Michal shares his journey from the early days of video game distribution in Poland to leading one of the world's most celebrated game development companies.”

A Collection of Industry Reports (Various Authors): Here are four recently released industry reports we found to be valuable reads:

• Gaming Industry Report - Q2 2024 (Konvoy.VC): "Gaming saw a 20% decrease in venture funding between Q1 2024 and Q2 2024, declining to $492m for Pre-Seed through Series E+ venture capital investments across 104 deals."
• Global Gaming Report Q2 2024: M&A Activity on the Rise for the 3rd Straight Quarter (Drakestar): "The Drake Star Global Gaming Report Q2 2024 analyses the second quarter for Gaming and Esports and outlines what to expect for the rest of the year."
• Report on the Future of Gaming and Game Development: A Preliminary Analysis of Spring 2024 Metrics and Upcoming Trends (Xsolla): "Launched on the heels of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024, this extensive report provides invaluable insights into the emerging trends and pivotal shifts impacting the gaming industry in the short and long term."

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